Free Tina Mcelroy Ansa by The Hand I Fan With Page A

“Business.”
    In the final analysis, the doctors couldn’t tell her any more than she had known that morning: Her cholesterol count was high, not over 200, but high. Her pressure was slightly elevated. And she needed to find a stress reliever in her life. But she was in pretty good shape for a woman her age and was basically healthy as a horse.
    The young doctor told her, “Ms. McPherson, we did an EKG, ran CAT scan, did X-ray and blood work and rushed it all through. But didn’t find a thing.”
    So the young nervous doctor gave Lena a shot for the pain she still felt in her head and sent her home with some pills, a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet guide, and an admonition to be watchful for signs of dizziness, headaches or blurred vision.
    She wasn’t a bit surprised to find Mr. Jackson still waiting for her outside the doctor’s office. He didn’t even ask Lena if she needed a ride. He just guided her to his truck and cranked up the engine.
    But instead of driving straight out Riverside Drive toward Lena’s house, the unsettled man turned back toward downtown and headed for Pleasant Hill. Lena just looked at the determined man behind the wheel. Now, Mr. Jackson knows good and damn well I don’t live at Mama and Daddy’s house, Lena thought. But she felt a little woozy, and she was just too weary to correct him.
    “By rights, I ain’t got no business taking you home, Lena. You need to stay in that hospital overnight,” Mr. Jackson said, oblivious to his mistake as he drove toward the big three-story red brick house trimmed in dark green paint on Forest Avenue. Mr. Jackson called the color “country green.” It reminded him of when he was a boy and cityfolks painted their porches that hue. He had painted many a porch in that color himself when he was making his way up in the business.
    As Mr. Jackson drove down Forest Avenue, he suddenly slammed on the brakes, throwing Lena against her seat belt.
    “Damn,” he said as both of them watched a line of snapping turtles, slow and heavy with eggs nearly two months earlier than normal, making their way across the road from the stream in the direction of the river.
    “Umph, never seen so many turtles and other water creatures in my life,” Mr. Jackson said as he brought the car back on his side of the road and turned into the long drive leading to her family’s large brick house. “You hit a couple of those bad boys on the road going ’bout fifty or sixty and you can kiss your sweet behind goodbye.”
    Lena raised her head a bit as the truck shimmied on the road and thought, Well, damn, it looks like
something
is determined to get me today.
    She shook her head gently a couple of times like one of her horses to clear her thoughts. The medication they had given her at the hospital had finally kicked in, taking the edge off the strange pain in her head. She didn’t even want to think it for fear that Mr. Jackson might hear her thoughts and take her back to the hospital, but Lena knew he was right. She
had
been hit with something back at The Place that morning.
    When Mr. Jackson pulled up to the end of the driveway of her parents’ deserted home, Lena just rested her head back on the truck’s seat and did not make a move.
    She didn’t really ever want to go back inside the house on Forest Avenue. Indeed, it was her childhood home. Her mother and father’s only home. The house that they had run together with her loving bossy grandmother. The house she left and returned to briefly before, during and directly after her college days.
    The house held many of her memories of being loved and spoiled and catered to and protected and babied. The only problem for Lena was that the big old brick house on Forest Avenue also held most ofher memories of being tormented and bedeviled, stalked and terrorized, manipulated and confused. The elegant old house haunted her with those memories whenever she entered. Lena agreed with the children of Pleasant Hill and most of the rest