cautionarytale

Life as Someone Outside of the Water and Her Daughters

First Draft--the Beach

She grew up around lakes, rivers, things that froze, that in the hottest hour of summer was a frosting 60 degrees that turned your feet blue but then you were so numb where blue you couldn't feel the scrapes the pricker branches made when you ran down the deer trail to jump in the creek where it's deep.

In fact her family was pretty well sandwiched in to the same general terrain by 3 or 4 Great Lakes, and had made it's name paternally through the contemplation, invention, and modification of the bamboo rod, which got most of its use from fly fisherfolk wading brooks. Beaches didn't enter her realm until she was an adult, and then they left no remarkable memories 99% of the time because they were putrid Floridian ones, with water almost hotter than the scorching sand, and no breeze , and lazy and still and smelling of decayed fish or looking of redtide. And there were warnings abounding about not eating the fish or you'd get red tide too.It's a bacterium. So they say.

But once, for four months, she lived on the beach in Los Angeles. And when she learned in the CICU that she was spent, she wanted just once more--it was silly, she knew--to be with her kids on the beach.And run through a field of wildflowers. Just because, because she didn't know they were the last time, the last time, and she wanted to experience these things knowing, feeling the profundity of this , that it is beach or field, running or star-gazing, hers that very moment --and over that very moment, for her. A send-off. A memorial service.

Second Stab-- A Beach Not The

Sherry Mangum is going to the beach. For the two weeks she knows about it, she has bittersweet feelings going on about it--it was what she panicked against losing, what her common sense choked on about her not going to live to be a hundred ; what she prayed for , even said her first rosary for, in hopes of obtaining, another day in the outside real world. after she was told she couldn't leave the hospital with her heart, it was so sick, and that some people had lived there 9 months waiting for a heart , too sick to go home; and that only one of every 4 patients in need of a transplant gets one; the other 3/4 die.

She wanted to see the beach a last time. Had she wanted to contemplate from a cell she'd have chosen the convent , which was as close to her all her youth as being a lobsterman is to the children of lobstermen-- the elderly nun she took various Our Lady of the Lakes Academy high school students to visit when she lived and learned at the august Catholic boarding school, was her grandmother's first cousin, and her mother's aunt Mabel had had a nun , too. That's what she'd have done had she been content to just sit under a flourescent or incandescent bulb and read the Bible or write or meditate. But she wanted in a bad way to go outdoors away from the hospital and live life a last time, running through a field of wildflowers or beholding the mighty ocean's roar, although the first step in becoming Christ-like and Mary-like, goals of hers, was to give up her will and her wants; and desire God's will in all things, PRAY to desire God's will, for that was a hard part;to be an empty vessel the Spirit fills with a Jesus-like spirituality.Ambition, the Christian's sole ambition to be pleasing to the Lord. To praise Him eternally ,reflect Him eternally, be willing to torch your own son if asked.She'd ask herself, would a loving fair and just and merciful (her new concept to obsess on this season) God not want me to go to the beach for any reason? As an impassioned teen she'd come up with the stories--that' s where I was going to drown but he saved me by keeping me from going--.Now she was more jaded , most likely to think, I would have come home and found my house robbed and burnt down. It was one reason she didn't do over-nighters anywhere--she and her kids had stayed at a pal's two nights a year before and come home to find the door wide open . It was the beginning of a long 2 years of harassment from a psychotic obese woman , who curiously always assumed no one could know for sure that it was her, as if there were anyone else walking around with that many missing marbles.What it signified was, you only get B&E ed when so and so knows you're off on a 2 day holiday; but so-and-so obviously meant for it to mean, "you can't afford to go away; escape a few days and you'll find your valuables gone or ruined", and that was the bottom line, all said and done anyway, making Sherry quite agree with her.

What God 's Will Leaves Her

So maybe God's cool with her going to a beach and maybe that's her will written all over it and she doesn't love Him enough and he feels rejected.Or maybe He keeps her so needy so she won't go to hell with the rest.It's probably the only reason she won't wash up on hell's shores with the rest--she certainly wasn't about to, while humming along on her merry way, investigate what SSI and Medicaid require of families in the two worst states for Medicaid and then, appalled at the truth, devote her life to changing things.She wasn't any better than anyone else, she was just dammed lucky, is all, God didn't save her alone like some modern day Noah,.she just guessed, because she has that extra dollup of sensitivity, she just found out, kept finding out, everywhere, talking to female teachers of her children, or Girl Scout leaders: that just about every old-looking lady with a teased, dyed, permed, blow-dried and expensive-to maintain hairstyle, carefully manicured and painted fingernails, and make up applied all over the face--eyeleds, eyelashes, cheeks, lips, and oh my goodness jewelry.,was rude, insensitive, and downright mean to a poor woman with missing teeth, no make up and plain long straight hair in her mid-forties.Even Bible-based ones. They yak and yak about solidarity, world unity, oh how they love to say their little Christian group has memberships in 33 countries! But they don't even consider dressing less expansively, more in line with world incomes, like in plain $5 peasant skirts from Indonesia , humble scarves and no make up to show they don't think the plain faces of natural women the world over are repulsive and abhorrant, and that as long as our sisters somewhere on earth starve and struggle from bad economics they will live in financial moderation as a show of solidarity, that as all seek less the fashionable home and car and clothing and more the basic needs of suffering humans down the street, and the self-loathing, the self-denial, world peace and unity can be possible-.Sherry thinks she hears this somewhere. Not the words but the truth. She can't believe people don't get it,, and gets a rush of excitement anytime she sees evidence of a radical Christianity on the lose.

Third World Catholic Bishops are always coming up with warnings to capitalistic America to do what is fair, that their economy must not deny any individual his dignity nor any family its sanctity, but this kind of stuff is rampant in U.S., and it would seem all the mini-kings and ladies would be scared they're going to hell, in the three and a half thousand feet homes each on a cul de sac and a manmade pond, with his and her bathroom sinks in the already his and her bathroom away across the house from the other rooms and bathrooms , which house upon divorce he tries to keep, stubbornly, living 10 years alone with 3.5 bathrooms.

She's just lucky, is all, fell into the world of unfairness, did the math like anyone would. $9,890 a year for a family of three translated into $3000 per person a year. Growing people, as, from age 7 to 8, 14 to 15.If you got them $300 in clothes a year, they had $2,700 each left, or about $270 a month to eat with.There's already a problem with coming up with the electric, phone, water and gas bills, changing the locks on the doors after being robbed . I mean, lucky nobody spends $270 a month to eat.That'd be $55 a week!

--Nowhere in that magic hat could you pull out $800 in property taxes a year, or $2000 to get a new roof, more to replace the ceiling and carpet the rain ruined after the roof went; Where are you suposed to get it from? Medicaid and SSI won't let a Floridian earn more than that a year, or be helped with food or bills, without taking away the equivalent in both income and medical from the recipient. If you get too much help, you don't qualify for Medicaid at all, and lose it. If that was they only way heart doctors would prescribe the pills you need to survive, is if you see them four times a year for $250, then you have to see them or you'll die. And you have to get those $400 a month medicines. And you can't go back to work and quit living on the dole--you have a year or less to live, have no stamina, your heart barely works, What you need are the rules changed to compassionate ones where society will give a terminally ill mom with custody of minors enough to swing it with...her property taxes dropped, her old ones forgiven, repairs to her home--rides to the grocery store.

Could it be God doesn't want their basic needs met? Now why wouldn't He want that?To be with her kids in a working home base--with flowing water, sewer, juice, DSL and the Cartoon network.she'd have to be vacationing in a motel, at this point.. They 'd remember it fondly..Like she remembers, forever, that on cross-country vacations as a middle-class American kid,she met kids in swimming pools, and played together hours.

She Doesn't Need Anything Else-She's Alive

God 's reprieved her, let her out of that insufferable flourescent-illumed bustling germ biosphere where they come at her at 5 a.m."Draw Blood?" and she can't be sleepy or they'll miss her vein the first five painful, agitating pokes.

Out of the Void, A Shoreline

She has to go home--no dinero-- to a house where the water isn't and the water company 's taken the meter.The roof leaks and it is the Florida rainy season, where it rains for two hours every afternoon with the United States' most concentrated lightning strikes. The areas in the living room ceiling that drip or shower water like fireworks emit sparks move about, so that eaving pots and pans under them are no good. Tomorrow it will leak a different place. For half the summer they used two sauce pans and a cake pan to catch all of it but the window leak, which took paper towels, several every fifteen minutes, to absorb what trailed down the stained oak frame. By summer's end they were using the 2 pots and the cakepan, a round cakepan, a pitcher, a plastic cup, a cupcake pan and a plastic silverware tray to divert or collect rain coming in the ceiling all brownish-red and smelling of rotted wood. Plastic bags on the couch arm sent those drips spinning into the silverware tray; other plastic protected the computer from sudden springs above it.As it rained Sherry had to sit up with it, like a babysiter with a newborn. She had to listen 9 no tv on) for the kind of sound water deops make on carpet, then scoot a container under the spot. As she added more containers, the rain began to get sophticated musically, each pan making a different note, the meter of the plops fast for some, slower for others,She had to let the 2 watch dogs in during a particlarly frightful electrical storm, and they kept her so busy dragging each to its post while the other sneaked into the house proper and shook his rain everywhere, that she didn't notice the big leak on her guitar for the first 29 minutes,.There was here that was so much near and dear to her, that she could not possibly leave the house and risk the leaks moving.. In fact, with a jolly dead limb as fat as a tree hanging over the living room, she knew it could fall and cave in the entire room any time, rain or water-logged sunshine. The city offered to take care of the limb, roof, ceiling, and carpet and other issues if she paid her property taxes up to date, some $ 7,000 less than the repairs will cost. But she can't lay her hands on the tax money. Her buddy that bobbed out of her world had gotten a $20,000 windfall the day he didn't say sayanora but could have, because he didn't talk to her again.It was a survival tactic--his bills all paid, his utilities all on, the money was all gravy for him--a new electric guitar, a decent car, things he ruminated about at length wih her , as if they were calculated with her in mind, suddenly things she'd never see. He could have turned her water on, or paved the way for her $8,000 in free repairs from the city by paying her back taxes, of all the people in the world, he could have done this and was her closest friend and called her daily. So his decision to hide from her the rest of his life really caught her by surprize. Her $80,000 house was willed to him, his name was at the childrens' schools as the party to call in the event she couldn't be reached. She could have paid him back when the roof was fixed by getting a mortgage loan--the only reason she couldn'rt get that to pay the taxes was because she had to have her roof fixed first. But he was a heavy drinker, and his besotted brain had no reasoning skills surviving, after nearly 30 years as a drunk.

Besides desperately needing money for back taxes, utilities that were cut off, and new school clothes for the kids, there were 26 more days without food or money ahead of them come the second of August.Sherry needed a tooth pulled that was infecting her jaw,but no one would pull it, it seemed pretty bleak as far as futures go . Her heart hurt badly and it was her time.The only bright vision was a promised mini-getaway for August 4,

Here's How That Went Down

A few weeks before August 4, she gets a call from one of the people in her Christian charasmatic group.:"I'm going to give you a ticket for two-days, one night or is it two nights, one day--no it can't be--an overnight stay at a luxurious Hilton Inn, beachfront room--would you use that? Could you use it? I got it for my son and his wife and baby but I think , under your circumstances---you don't seem excited? Are you interested? Could you use it, or don't want it, or what? I tthought it might provide some special moments for you and the girls. I originally got it for my son, at an auction, but he can't come before it expires so I didn't know what to do with it. It says it has a $185 value but I think --I think I only paid $100 for it, but don't tell anyone, and they'll think you got this $185 gift," she said, stage whisper, like" great plan, this."..like there was anyone to tell anything to, these days.

"oh, Alice, I've got tears in my eyes-"Sherry insisted to the telephone. "It's so kind of you! I haven't had a shower in almost two weeks. I couldn't have waited another--This is so wonderful!"

"Uhhh----I'm going to California for 2 weeks tomorrow to visit my brother and I'd prefer you wait until I'm back, if it's alright, so I can come by and visit you-all at the pool! " Alice said this enthusastically, like it was a great reason to wait two more weeks to bathe.

"Ok", Sherry said, shrugging ."I'm sure my water will still be off then, and then I'll really need that shower."

"Oh lets hope not!" Alice said, aghast."Why would you say that?"

Sherry didn't say anything. Alice knew the score.

The hotel ticket came in the mail two days later "With love and all my unity, from Alice O' Greene Mayo."

Sherry waited for the call, which came on a day ducks were squawking overhead, flying south from a coldening Canada.As she'd predicted, her feet were so caked with crud she'd had to pry black out of the crevices between toes and toenails with toothpicks. She'd farmed the youngest kid out to 2 families a week each and they all reunited this Sunday before school began for the year and Alice, who'd by now insisted on driving, picked them ,and their neighbor-girl guest, up for the hour ride to the gulf beaches.

"What's wrong with your hand?" Alice said sharply to Sherry as she frowned over Sherry's obvious inability to help carry the picnic bags she'd collected for them.

"I ulneated a herb," Sherry said."Pressed my ulnating nerve. I paralyzed. it's ok,"she finished. Her old friends would have laughed at her searching for words.This friend in Boblical -Biblical unity had her head tilted one side, a frown always on her face, her stabs at humor dumb; her ability to see it zip..Sherry missed her friend,who'd left her, apparently forever, no conversation, just hid and stopped returning calls, a best friend of 8 years standing,who understood things and was the perfect mellow companion. Except when in an alcohol-fueled rage. This is how she's surviving his rapid dirty rotten lowdown departure --recalling how he'd never had class, faked it, whever he springs up in her thoughts. It wasn't particularly working, like here, when she thinks how he'd have understood her ( just so yesterday she would have thought-- now she realizes she doesn't know what he can understand, at all.). Her left paw is partially paralysed and she's a lefty. Good ole Alice wasn't much interested in that at all.

Their Christian group is a collected people wordwide living the same Boble (yes his name was ) Buble Bible that is verse monthly believing that as all become one, all will live it in unison and be the perfect world on earth as it is in Heaven. Sherry was a careful joiner and was only involved in a few things--the D.A.R..,a registered independant voter , and now in the Hearth Movement some fifteen years. The Bible verse they picked monthly always boiled down to the instruction to love. Love in a radical new way . Concretely. Goodbye Self hello neigbor I would die for. Dying for the neighbor didn't mean die death die it meant dying to yourself, to perfectly serve the other.You always compromise. You love the other . Every Bible verse the hearth lived was love. It semed about what she was up to so Sherry and her sister joined the secular movement at age 17 and 21.Her sister didn't stick with it because it was "too marionist," Lydia haughtily proclaimed. She'd on her own studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran, whatever the words are for the places and evidences of Christ (and Edgar Cayce by extension)'s reality.Lydia had studied the languages of the Bible, would go into how the original word for this was that and in the translation---

for example, the Bible verse warning God's people not to call another "Father." She could explain all that off; one or other of the words having connoted something else to the Hebrews originally .

Sherry did not find the hearth family Mary enough. Although they called themselves "The Children of Mary" at the last minute and got Catholic blessing , no one mentioned Mary at any meeting she'd attended ( 30 by now).And though they promised they were not Catholic, even Christian, but a group comprised of all denominations , Muslim and Orthodox and Lutheran and Anglican--the members in the group in her area were shocked to learn that Sherry's older daughter wasn't baptised (Catholic) and urged it with great intensity.

Focolare meant family hearth and Sherry had expected maybe warm pine paneling and great-grandmother's colorful afghans on the couches and chairs, but the house they met at was ostentatious, with a guest bathroom shower curtain made for a queen in thick deep purple tiers and bows . The people- they all had rouge, lipstick, eyeshadow, nice clothes with matched shoes not patched ones, hairdos not just long straight hair in their 40s as a sort of unity with Europe and the third world,. Sherry knew a couple of 20-year-old hippies that were more in harmony with the earth and love than these spiritually dedicated ones seemed. The hippies talked of Gaia and Mother Earth and had drum circles and decorated their humble pads with rocks, shells, and drifftwood, and took off shopping on bikes with cotton sacks to carry purchases in.The focolare had sounded like a Catholic intellectuals unite! sort of passion for justice thing but it was old ladies in the perfume and hairstyling and makeup of the kind of lady who didn't cotton to Sherry at all. Resolutely, Sherry'd stuck it out, returning monthly to develope a family-like relationship with the young filippino members and their babies ,or the sweet nurse who lost her husband and then her dad. Lately she'd found out there was an inner circle, including Alice, and the two sisters who hosted the gatherings , and that's all Sherry learned about it. It rather bothered her that her own religious gang had a secret inner circle. She liked translating everything down to love but was hesitant to bring Protestant and agnostic friends to a gathering the way the rainbow people brought any one interested into theirs--it did have an exclusivity about it, a kind of superiority complex in the leaders, Catholics very active in their parishes singing and such.

Alice had produced a play for her church and brought Sherry and kids to see it. They'd loved it so much they'd bought a video of it when the parish put it up for sale. Alice tsked tsked Sherry about wasting money."Oh we loved all those actors, all the charactors--it was so well cast--" Sherry gushed.

"I mean, you need to get your children clothes , you need to be practical," Alice said.

Sherry was stung. She'd not before seen someone critical of the .degree of interest she took in their artistic efforts. All her life it had been,"Come see the band" , like, supporting us is a great way to love us.

Then Alice let it spill that they had just finished a 10-day run of the sequel to the play, casting the same chaacters. Sherry said "Oh no! There's not even one more day?" Alice shook her head as if sad .

"But I don't understand. You knew we were huge fans--why didn't you tell us ?" Sherry blurted out.

"I've been so busy-well, directing, rehearsing--I never had a moment to think," the good -hearted Christian said.

That made it a hard friendship to forge , and Shere continued to give more of herself and time to her secular friends than to Alice and the 2 elderly sisters , her spritual family. The non-religious friends paid Sherry back by one turning on her and one dropping her without discussion (that was more than a friendship, and quite the more painful loss). Her city water off and her needs unmeetable, Sherry still hadn't turned to the hearth . Instead, Alice had called, her, prying their details out of Sherry when she got home from the hospital.

Along about the 7th week without water, Sherry couldn't keep from snorting; Alice had that effect. Alice had just said,"What about family? Can your parents help you ?"

("Oh, gee, Alice, that never occured to me! You are so smart! Of course my parents can pay it ! Wow, why did I go without water so long , how silly of me !" )

When Sherry calls to set the appoinment she already has the list of days it has to be, according to when Alice can make it: Sunday the third of August, , the list says.

There's a room. Smoking. Oceanside. She books it, confirms it with Alice, who says she's going to drive Sherry and the kids there and pick them up the next day, if that's alright.

Sherry complains--to others, not Alice. Alice mailed her the ticket, she explains, as if it were hers, a gift to her. Now she's confused. Can Alice micro-manage a gift she's already let go of?

"She should've said, I've got a room I'd like to share with you ," Sherry's friend Diane allows, in a phone conversation.

"yeah."

"Well, don't let any idiot ruin it for you--have the experience you prayed so ferverantly for in the CICU; That God let you get out to have."

"Yeah." Sherry clears her throat."This is beginning to make the object of my last desires look way over-rated."

Sherry is on Social Security, which comes on the 3rd of the month except when the third is Sat or Sun or a bank holiday, then it comes the last business day before that. So on Friday she recieved her August income of $545, and the $100 each minor child got, a grand total of $745 a month,or about minimum wage looks after taxes, 40 hrs @ $5.55 per=$225.00weekx4=$900 a month before taxes, or about $800. Familis of three are suposed to be making it on this all over the great land.Sherry calls the phone company on the 31st to see if she can pay less and the man who pulls up her account gets bent out of shape that she tried to work out payment arrangements and says with a click of the mouse he has voided her arrangements and she now has to pay 50% more by the next day to keep her service on, another $ 236 for a $636 total.After that, she spends the remaining money on food for the month and giving her teenager the dough to go to Bush Gardens with her friends as summer ends, a memory of her 15th summer, since there had been nothing else, except living without water, her mom's sudden cardiac death, and her three-legged dog Rocket disappearing and never coming back.

She thinks she can afford to give the teen $20 to go to the theme park because she konws Alice is providing food for the Hilton stay, saving Sherry from 4 meals at the Hilton's restaurant . (Pancakes with strawberries and french toast with cinnamon, four eaters, ,six something dollars each. )Alice has asked for a list of foods they like and remarked on the value of each :

A: Do they like fruit?

S:Oh yes--it's been weeks since we had fresh fruit--I'd love so much to be able to get each an apple or an orange.All we get grom the church pantry and Meals on Wheels is friut cocktail and applesauce. I wanted to get each girl an apple so bad--

A: Just one? That's not a very practical way to shop!Why don't I do this--I'll get a bag of apples, some oranges--what other fruit do they like?

S:That's enough--that's great!

A:"Just tell me what other kinds of fruit they like."

S:Strawberries.(Silence from Alice.) Melon. Grapes. Bananas."

A:Strawberries are way over-priced and melon--we have too much to carry in the first place. Melons' pretty messy, too. maybe I ought to get something , neat."

S:Nothing could be neater than apples and oranges and grapes and bananas and berries in their own skins,

(trying to sound light-hearted after being forced to name more foods than she felt they deserved and then rediculed over it --"stawberries are expensive, i.e., you expect too much...")

A(during another call):So, I got apples and oranges and ham and cheese and chips--do they like dip?"

S:"Nah, they're fine without dip. That's so kind, you've been too kind, Al-"

A:"Are you sure? What kind do they like-salsa?"

Sherry had never afforded dips. "No," she said firmly.

"Are you sure? You gotta have dip, when you're on vacation!How about Ranch?"

"Sure."

"Ranch is ok? But not salsa. I'm writing this down; now--for the ham sandwiches. You said they all can eat mustard?"

"yeah, I mean no, Jinx eats only mayyo , Zoe only mustard. They're kind of hard to have together but there's only a few more years of that--"

"So, mayo -mustard.No mayyanoise. No, Mayonaise , right?"

Somewhere along the phone lines it comes up that Sherry doesn't have a swimsuit. She allows as to how she tried hers on and it was shot, the elastic around the upper thighs gone, the outfit illegal. Clever Alice immediately says she'll lend her one, gets her size, and pooh-poohs Sherry's defenses . Sherry explaining 5 times that she is going to puchase one, that she is getting her check Friday and that is 2 days she has to buy one before arriving at the beach.

..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, Alice rejoined, as if Sherry had only thought she could speak, but was making no sound."I got you a bathing suit," Alice says, next day, over the phone."It's gorgeous--a really pretty blue--floral print , of course, they all are--but this one has like a long matching "wrap," they call them, you'll see. What size are you?"

Sherry's told her ten times, she hasn't bought a swimsuit since before she had a baby, and her first is 15 now.

She guesses anything near 36-28--36, which makes Alice make a definitive click of her tongue 77777g sound. Blue hiliter."Well anyway then Ruby gave me one she only wore once that should fit you fine.it's a medium. I hope it does, and you like it,then I can take the one I paid for back. I'll bring them both and you decide. I'll give you a big blue straw hat that will go with either of them. It will especially like, you know, accent the plain one. Do you all have straw hats , you do , right? What, no straw hats? Especially here in Florida, you have to protect their prescious skin. So I'll be over tomorrow evening to see if which fits. You pay those utility bills and let me cover your needs for this vacation ."

When she arrives she says she has left the store-bought swimsuit in the trunk because she doesn't want Sherry to be biased; she wants to return it if the free one works .It does, after a fashion. Sherry's always discretely hid her defibrillator under swimsuits past, and this suit showcases the card-deck on an angle sewn under her skin and arm where most people have a nice pocket of fat but she has nothing, so it protrudes awkwardly,the wires wrapped around it instead of tucked under it out of the way, the whole bony-looking protrusion ugly to behold, confusing to an eye used to compact little units inserted straight, not diagonally.

It is a flesh colored swimsuit with no skirt, tummy tucker, anything like she'd always worn , just flat out exposes all her vulgarities. And the shots all over her leg--the red dots left by the needle after injecting interferon weekly for 4 months.There isn't a top to the swimsuit, either, not until half down her chest, sustained by her drooping little breasts. So all that private area, miles of pale skin surrounding the machine under her skin, her generator, laid to stares. Sherry is awkward, defensive.

"Oh don't stand like that, you have a great figure!" Alice enthuses."Shoulders back. Come on, shoulders back! Good, it fits. I was hoping it would so I could take the one I paid for back. And don't ask me to show it to you now--of course it's nicer--it's blue !--but you'd get a preference for it, that's why I had you try this one on first. You won't be using a bathing suit too many more times so a new one was really a big waste of money.."

Sherry knew she was overly sensitive but this was too much, She had intended to buy a suit on the first, had tried to afford one all summer. And now they were on sale 50% to 70% off. Which she'd told Alice the other day. But when Alice bought the suit and called to say so, and that she'd like to try the one somebody called Ruby had worn only once, because new ones cost so much, Sherry had asked if they were all still 50 to 70 per cent off, and Alice closed her tight tiny mouth and said "They're all too much," in an angry tone. Sherry got the feeling that Alice had called the faith-based group's inner circle together in a panic about what she was doing for this poor white family and they'd told her firmly to not let them push her around, to give her this here--it's a suit somebody donated to the cupboard we give to the poor, but say it was mine and I wore it only once , or she'll prefer a new one--then take the new one back. Be firm."Sherry , she wanted to get a swimsuit this year so she could go swimming too many more times. ---She wouldn't in this ugly tight faded suit. It may have been worn once but it had still gone through a washing machine dozens of times.And it exposed too much of a person who needed to avoid all sunlight .

The employees of the Hilton wear island shirt uniforms of exactly the same color scheme--light blue and rust-colored objects on flesh-yellow/pink background. But that's not why people stare, or it may have drawn the initial glane (excuse me--oh, sorry--) but the big funky thing looking like a missle landed near her collar bone make them look at her face again, evaluating her longer than others in their minds. She is the fly-on-the-wall type , maybe the original--she is fascinated by personality, wanted to be a documentarian of colorful people and locales undocumented--but she can't stand being seen, observed. Alice is a clown--a real clown, for Christ's sakes, and also directs her church plays. On arrival at the beach Hilton, and being told it would be 45 minutes before their room was ready, Alice starts saying,"Let's change in the bathroom in the parking garage and swim while we wait--everybody for that?" , and the kids start non-responding. So Alice pulls Sherry away from them on a pretext and then demands "Let's change into our swimsuits in the restroom and go swimming while we wait for the room." Considering how many times she'd been rebuffed, it seemed as if she were saying, "I am going to do this my way."

""I'm sorry that the kids keep not responding to that," Sherry offers.

"Why? Just tell them we're doing it. They don't have a choice."

"I 'd guess they have good reasons," Sherry starts, tries to start, starts to try."Maybe we'll check out our room, lay back awhile watch a little bit of tv, and watch how all this is before we jump into it. It's whatever they want."

it was the best way Sherry could explain it, given no time to think. It sounded good to her--We introverts, you extrovert. We don't just jump in like that.

"You're saying it's up to the children?Do you realize this room cost $185?That's rediculous., let the children choose.What if they want to watch tv the whole 24 hours?"

Sherry trys to soften the flinty , agitated Irish woman. "Oh, we're going to use the facilities, Alice! I may have to take some heart meds first and I didn't want to explain this in front of everyone but Zoe is on her period, so maybe she wants to take care of a few things in the privacy of our room beore she goes--swimming."

This, as it later was prooved, was the prime opportune time for Alice to warn Sherry that women on their periods should not go in salt water because fish smell a drop of blood from 4 miles away. But Alice says nothing furter.

That she waits for Zoe for. All three girls, so the other two can conclude that Zoe was having her period. Then Alice said,

"Oh, and if any of you are having your period you can't go in the ocean at all because big fish can smell a drop of blood from four miles away and a shark will coeme eat you! I'm sorry but you can't go in the salt water at all this trip."

Zoe shoots daggers at Alice with a glance. I don't get, Sherry thinks, head swirling. I made it clear I contributed that piece of information out of earshot of the children on purpose. I confided in her on a highly personal matter she forced us to reveal...she dicked me!

The two girls Alice obviously wasn't ordering to stay ashore--ages 9 and 11--look uncomfortably at their shoes. Alice has chosen to stick around after the room is available at 3 pm., finally leaving at six . It takes her three hours to say "Don't forget to put the sunblock on every 45 minutes " twenty times to the children as if she were leaving them alone without an adult, or with a mom so irresponsible all their lives she'd never gotten them sunblock , and to say "You don't take your room towels down to the pool--they have towels for guests down at the pool area" 15 times,and "so make them the ham sandwiches the first night and the tuna make it up tonight for tomorrow's picnic on the beach, right?" 14 times. Mostly Sherry didn't bother to explain things to her like that she has two ruptured discs and isn't about to sit on the beach without lower back support. Carrying all the luggage around though because Alice decided she didn't want to give them a few dollars to tip the" bellboy " ( a girl in her 20's, as Sherry had been when a bellhop in 1974) with , Sherry pulled her pacemaker muscle and suffered deep pain and the lack of use of her left arm for days afterwards.

So when they get the room, they all are forced to ready for a swim immediately, and down at the pool, Alice reaches into a big straw bag and gets a blue straw hat out of a frosty plastic bag and puts it on. "How do you like this, guys?" She says to the kids, not looking at Sherry."Aren't I stunning?"

Back at the room with just Sherry, Alice gushes,"oh! Do you want to know how I solved the fruit problem? I got 12 little cans of fruit cocktail! What's wrong? Don't they like fruit cocktail?"

"Oh sure, thanks," Sherry manages, trying not to choke.

"And I got little applesauces,with fruit in them. You don't look very excited. "

"oh, I am."

"Well, I hope so--I can't take it back."

By the time she leaves the sun is a mere yellow lemon preparing to set, people strolling up the beach to catch it, the Hilton pool empty. With the sliding glass door open the air blows in balmy. It is not bringing back her months living in a century-old redwood cottage on the Pacific . It's not cold, nor exciting enough a sea. She can't decide what to do.wants to walk with the people along the hard part of the sand , the sparkling darker part the waves and white foam pull back from over and over, and to swim in the pool four floors below her, and to watch herself do it from the balconey.

Since being a balcony observer is the least of the options likely to ever present itself to her again, , she decides to stay there, slider wide open, wishing she was one of the sun-dappled women her age at the shoreline or part of the water-freeks in the big, sun-heavy azure pool kicking like frogs and floating on their backs .

But the kids she has don't want to go anywhere---pool or walk or ocean edge--and being out on a balcony like that, barefoot and hair blowing, makes her think of people on balconies she couldn't get on, in Key West and Tampa's Ybor City district, hanging out in their exclusivity in the middle of the street action , a living people of an exotic, breathing culture, for cetainly the middle-class folks she knows would never be so downtownish.

This is a Hilton, one far from innovative in design, resembling photos she's seen in coffee table tomes of Cuba: a plain white rail, two cheap white webbed chairs, a little patterned-plastic round tabletop , an ocean with no liners or tankers on the horizon, no ships or boats at all.

The only energy is in a boy with a skim board, who chases the waves repeatedly, sailing down the shallow water retreating from shore, or stirring right over the surf before stalling in the one-wave sea and sinking slowly. Cloud formations catch the waning sunlight on their tips.A dusky rose appears on the horizon suddenly, ballooning up into half the big sky view seamlessly.

"We're going in the pool," the kids yell now, and within a minute she's seeing them below her, running and jumping in, the youngest holding her nose. Now the sun looks like it is the feeder river to this body of water, a molten lava flow between pink hills and plateaus as crackly-thin-looking as the ground around the geysers and hot springs of Yellowstone. Sail to the edge, the vista teases, and you'll enter this pleistocene place. You wanted to, but you knew it was blood-red sun and clouds. Then the tiki torches flared into the sky , bright, while the sun was as pale as an orange on purple print .Those who followed it are returning east in droves now. Sherry wants to wrap up in the world.

She finds the kids eager to stroll with her. Zoe has a sunburnt ear and April a headache from the smell of sunblock. The neighbor girl is fatter than she was last year. They walk as far as they do, miles, two miles east, then turn around. This view is the more engaging, they see immediately. The fingers the tide touches and recedes from glow, between them and the pink sky, shimmering as though just painted.There are the lights of some civilization on a point behind them, the rose horizon ahead of them, and inbetween, a dark black sky so lined and limned it looks to hold a hundred squall lines. Above the late sun is one pitch-black cloud whereas the ones behind them are opaque. It's a grand moment to spend with her treasures, her babies, an excellant gift from Alice once Alice let go of it, finally.

"Does she know anything?" the neighbor's kid says with an apologetic smile;sorry I have to bring this up.

"No, I don't think so," she says, as if to another adult; kids and Sherry going way over heads all the time.

"Maybe you should like sort of clue her in," says Maxine .

"I can't; she doesn't give the opportunity," the nice mom wails."You hear it. "

"Pardon?" says the girl. Her tee-shirt reads,"I can't hear you ."

"Just thinking of one episode, how everyone has a pass to Busch Gardens, free the rest of the year when you buy one entry to it," Sherry says slowly." I finally get one for my teenager? Who hasn't been since she was 6? Alice , looking for signs I need financial counseling but here was the only one, that I sent my daughter off to play with the wolf at the door . So she punishes me by leaving us here without a dime. Without a dime. I would have given my own sister at least ten bucks. And I don't even drink--- and I'm saying, I'd give a drinker some dough to be here with. Especially a non-drinker mom with kids and a few months to live. I think she hates me"

"oh, we never would have guessed,"Maxine scoffs, and this makes Sherry realize :others think so , too.--- She's been hoping she's running a little paranoid. .

"Well it cost money to raise kids," Sherry says.

Before the other night, Zoe had never gone off unchaperoned with kids in her life. There had never been a neighbor kid. Maxine was the neighbor kid and lived 2 miles away. Fifteen, and never begun to step into her adult . No one else down the pike would have ever realized that; a foster mom might have thought Zoe's desire to be alone with two girlfriends and no adults was self-centeredly a desire to ride fairground rides and meet boys all day when she needed to 'finally" buckle down and help the family cut back on expenses; at least Alice immediately had.

"She can just grow up," Alice had said haughtily, in just one more of her many ironic statements. Zoe has never been on a roller coaster or any other type of ride---they are totally priced beyond Sherry's abilities--and the two girls she went with don't care for awkward, acned, broken-voiced high school boys. Finally, Zoe's hobby is drawing manga, a Japanese art involving fictitious high school girls on their own with no parents around, meeting at libraries and cafes, using magical gifts to slay evil, much like how the Olsen twins as preteens and then teens go everywhere unchaperoned, and kids in millions of movies and series like Lizzie Maguire. The world television reflects to America is one of pre-teens meeting up in skating rinks and bowling alleys. Zoe could not keep writing about something knowledgably that she'd never experienced. It was time for the little bird to fly.The twenty dollars it had set her mom back, Sherry had told herself ,was recouped by the food Alice bought for them . But Alice's anger that Sherry did not have this $20, that she had moronically given it to a teen , extended the act to a lifestyle issue, the crime to one of significant proportions--the $20 would have been $20 more that Sherry would have spent on the phone bill, that she'd slighted the phone company only because it meant so much to Zoe. She wouldn't have had it at this hotel, now, anyway. But Alice was going to treat her as though she could have still used that if she had been careful, the next fifty-five times she needed food or cab fare..

Rubbing her aching wrist from handling heavy luggage too long today, Sherry thinks, I know the orphanage will never take them anywhere after I 'm not here so anything I want to be sure they get to try I have to get done now. And Alice doesn't get it. That I wanted to live this long to help guide them, participate in their growth as humans. Not just eat fruit cocktail, drink water, and let others pick out the kids' Christmas presents and school clothes each year--don't they ever ever consider that I might like shopping, too? Every year they apologize, some stranger, some Christian, for buying my kids too much but they love to shop....like I want to go to my grave having never got to select a neat gift for my kid or anyone else ever again.Like i don't want to get something really really special from me to my daughter--I'd rather hustle them into buying my kids gifts. Right.

It 's not exactly the precious time with her kids Alice had first painted for her--the teenager acts disdainfully toward Sherry, saying Good Night like a peeved Queen of Hearts only when forced. The younger two girls draw back from Sherry too, her little buddy at first not wanting to swim or walk or be with her mom at all, beginning with sharing a bed, which seemed to bother the eaves-dropping Alice so much that she hung out another three hours either to see to it the children were safe with their mom or to see if mom really had a swimsuit and was just trying to con clothes out of naive religious people (because if she had anything, it would look better than what Alice had given her to wear, and she'd have brought it).Sherry knew that April was jealous ("I hate Maxine," she'd also said, and "I want to go home .Now. can I go home? I don't want to stay here," and, "I hate Zoe. Does Zoe have to come? can you send her back with Alice?" , because the other 2 girls were off swimming in the ocean without her, and she was stuck with Alice following her around grinning in her big blue straw hat and India-looking bathing suit wrap or cover-up that is twisting to the ground, saying,"And don't forget to set the alarm for 9, I can't afford to get hit with a second night ;you all have to get up, check out by 11, now..."

Alice seemed to think April was fearful--of some plan her mother had, to meet up with an abusive male lover or something, maybe? __was that why she woudn't leave? As soon as Sherry got in the room, two queen beds, bright fabrics, balcony, gleaming glass desk with a lamp, ashtray, phone, and tablet and pen on it---Sherry'd immediately pulled her notebook and pen and books out of her bag and set them on the desk and said "oh a desk! I haven't had access to one in so long!This is so good of you, Alice, I really am just so happy.."

Alice had just asked her if she liked the room. As if she cared, for when Sherry said this, Alice opened the cooler and put wet, greasy ham in plastic on the desk.

"Oh no," Sherry said."I was going to keep the food over yon. Keep this as a desk. It's so wonderful."

"SO selfish," Alice corrected."What do you mean? How would the children eat, if you wouldn't let this --it's the only table in the room."

"oh they write too I mean they're the writers I mean," Sherry couldn't explain, how could she explain?"There's a whole shelf by the tv, for food," she hinted. The older, more mature Christian , who seemed to be biting her tongue a lot tonight, was grimly silent.

Alice's last words as she was leaving were,"I just got a great idea! if you move those 2 chairs from the balcony in here, that's 4 chairs you can put around the table and have a supper table !"

Sherry feared her smile was plastered on her face , but at least Alice finally left; she was through conducting every aspect of how her gift got experienced.

The girls braid each others' hair in tiny braids. Zoe's never had her hair cut so hers take the longest, but look the best. They play with the blow dryer and watch one show--an anime fav--and fall asleep .After all , they'd swam a few hours and then walked about four miles. The pillows too are so inviting, the clean sheets so comfortable after living so long without water or money to do laundry out.

Alice had taken them to mass before bringing them to the beach and watched Sherry have to ignore the usher with the basket on a pole. Sherry felt Alice watching her. Alice put nothing in but then this wasn't her church. Sherry felt this da, da, dum-dum... is Sherry going to put a few bucks in the basket or does she not have enough faith to give God her first fruits? Is she a flake, fake Christian with a long way to go?

Yep.

"oh dear yes, "actually...same thing, though.

Alice saw Sherry have to pass up the church collection ,but at the hotel told Sherry (and 3 kids who really didn't want to hear all this) that "you have to tip the bellman --you do have money don't you? No ? You don't have a few dollars to tip the bellman? Well then you're just all going to have to carry your luggage then I'm not paying your tip, I mean, I paid $100 and got you food and then Zoe can go to Busch Gardens--I'm sorry, but you should have saved some money for this trip, for tips . You've got three heathy backs to carry everything. And they can drink water."

"And you have to leave the maid three dollars. because those people are from the third world where people have a lot more problems than you and they really need it."

The fourth or fifth time she says "You always tip the maid," Maxine says"Why? She won't be cleaning for us. We have to check out before she cleans.""

Sherry about then is feeling that after all these instructions for how to enjoy Alice's gift to them, she's been totally diminished as a competent mom, as the person in charge, here;she's lost all self-respect the 20 hours here may have otherwise afforded her.

"It doesn't matter if you're returning to the room after she cleans it, its customary to give them about three dollars a day.

Do you have any money?" she asks Sherry sharply.

"No,"Sherry has to say, ashamedly. Not ashamed of herself--ashamed of this lady, who was admitting her shameful hostilities and judgemental nature and lack of sensitivity,as much as she was disapproving that Sherry apparently , clearly, to Alice at any rate, didn't put money in her church collection basket because she thinks she's exceptional, poorer than anyone else,because spiritually she's so much weaker than Alice.

"Well, we've got to leave her $3, so I'm going to put it right here, alright?" Alice said, putting 3 crisp one dollar bills in the clean glass ashtray like Sherry would never use it ."Alright? It'll be safe here. Nobody touch this money ok?It's for the maid."

Sherry stuck it in her purse the moment Alice was gone. "I saw that," said Zoe, with the other girls, inspecting the balconey view.

"My mother said third world people are being hired by big resorts and high school and college students can't get those jobs anymore,"Maxine said."But, that's not the case here. I saw 2 pool-cleaners and 2 maids and they are definitely all American."

"How do you know," Sherry said.

"One asked Zoe if she goes to Friss High School. He just graduated from Friss last year."

"Ah ha," Zoe's mom said. "What else do you know about third world wages?"

"They pay them less," Maxine said hotly.

"Well, not in the U.S. In the U.S., we have a minimum wage. Do you know it?"

"$10 an hour?" said Zoe.

"I think it's $5.65 ,"Sherry said. "If a mom with two kids works 40 hours a week she gets what I get a month--$800.See she pays taxes. I don't so it comes out the same.Well, some people don't like the non-taxpayers. Think they have attitudes."

"She's the one with the attitude," Maxine said."She kept telling us not to forget to leave the three dollars there, like she didn't mean it would be our fault if we stold it, just that she was so sure she had to keep telling us or we'd have accidently stold it . Too weird."

"The maid gets paid 2 to 4 times a month," Sherry said."She'll have another check in a week or two. I won't. "

"She gets 3 dollars more a day, too," Maxine said.

"$3 more a room," Zoe corrected her.

"Unreported, untaxed income with their best wishes attached," Sherry said sourly.

"I was like, does Zoe's mom have a history of stealing thses people's tips, because if she doesn't, I'd be pretty mad if I were her--"

"My first one," Sherry said with pretend pride.

"Yesterday, she was taking us to the ocean, she said people could always give to others no matter how poor they are," Maxine said."You could, she said, pick flowers for them from the side of a road--"

"Or weed their flowerbed for them," Zoe said."Why does she think somebody here's so poor or something? I mean its' all she talked about. Like Maxine really wanted to hear it."

"Usually,"Maxine volunteered,"people go away to the beach to forget their ordinary troubles for a day , or something. Not talk about it the whole time. It's been awful!"

" I know, you poor child, and your dad just getting his colostomy bag removed after the hospital gave him that serious infection --" Sherry rubbed the girl's shoulder affectionately, but carefully because they'd all gotten sun. What was she doing, turning petty from over-exposure to Alice? The one person here who's woes hadn't been attacked under a microscope, and she can't stand it, has to remind the child ?

Sherry thinks of how she had to tell Alice four times "I took the kids to motels in 19 states,Alice, I know all this"(finally Alice muttered, yeah, but they weren't like this one", to which Sherry honestly responded,"Yes, many of them were nicer."Three times, she had to say,"Alice, we lived at a nice hotel in Torrence for 4 months a few years ago--" and two times,"I know, Alice, I was a bellhop for a place this swank myself," and once, "Alice, we've been alone together before."

"Here's how you open the drapes," Alice would continue, whatever she ws going on about.Reading a very obvious plexiglass-framed sign on the desk--"Don't hang your towels or anything on the railing."

"I already read it,"Sherry the Merciless said.

"Look here, see?" Alice said, her blue straw hat bobbing as she stooped and straightened She let it fall , what she held having more importance. Sherry gazed at the poodle-like curly grey hairs cascading off Alice's head in a shag -like style.

"Here," Alice, redirecting her gaze."I put the grocery bag I brought the breakfast bars in , in this can so it won't get dirty. You can always think of others, you know, no matter how poor you are."

That was where Sherry wanted to slug someone. This woman did not know Sherry at all. Even if she'd never talked to her, Alice had no cause to believe that Sherry didn't think of others, all the time; rather, because Sherry went to church and belonged to a faith-based group, it would tend toward seeming likely she did think of others and have a social conscience. But the lady kept telling her not to steal her tip for the maid, a nd now to consider others and how she could make their lives better even without money to give.

That would be perhaps a nice sentiment to give the third world maid she'd never met. But she knew Sherry, knew that she wasn't , for example, shooting porn videos all evening after work with a bunch of vodka and scotch in her while her children were tied to their beds ...she didn't know diddley about the maid .Also, rather unforgivably, she knew about Sherry's aspirations from Sherry's many frank discussions with her about how Sherry was trying to live the Bible verse they lived that month or had found the Divine Mercy chaplet enlightening and was applying that message also--so not just living a radical love of everyone but also mercy. And Alice , saying back," look, look how a grocery bag fits in a wastebasket. We can do these little acts of love for each other," like this was preschool and she taught it.

Sherry has the sliding glass door open--in real estate parlance, the slider. She's on a wicker chair with a blue and orange chair pad on it, in a room with the same paintings on the wall the one Medicaid oral surgeon in 3 counties had in all his exam and waiting rooms--pink, white, and green seaside cottage scenes with exoticflowery foilage in the foreground and puffs of clouds for the top third of the print, so identical-seeming you think the dope has gotten two of the same scene by mistake until the subtle diffs coax out. Unsigned paintings, they were so bad. They were suposed to say "Florida!" But the big red flowers at the bottom of each said "Hawaii!"

The bedspreads over the kids are quilted orange-shebert, white, and dark green floral prints,. The waves so close lull her into a momentary timelessness. She could get ancient and love every moment of it. She had and did , in fact.

Waiting, she is, to see if her defibrillator is magic. "Half of you die slow painful deaths as your organs suffocate one by one," the cardiomyopathy expert had said to her."The other half die suddenly. We know from these tests that you aren't in the first group."

"We do?"

"Are you kidding? Your organs are in perfect condition. Your creatin level's better than mine."

"So I'll die suddenly?"

"That's what we hope the defibrillator will prevent."

"So I'll never die."

He didn't respond. She'd read, though, of a man whose defibrillator shocked him every minute for 24 hours until he begged for it to be shut off, knowing what it meant.he didn't want another 24 if that was the quality. The doctors agreed and let him die.

The children are asleep, all of them, on their backs, their freshly-colored faces sprucing their normal beauty up a few notches.

Sherry had tried to tell Alice that $800 a month for a family of three was not enough for anyone. That it had no provisions for property taxes and house repairs, or the purchase of a family car and auto insurance and auto repairs--that you couldn't go anywhere on that. That she wasn't allowed to make a penny more without losing her Medicaid and disability check. That a lot of people made it because they took in money under the table they didn't report so they kept their Medicaid and bennies while earning and getting enough dough to make ends meet. Like by getting $3 per motel room per day extra for cleaning motel rooms.

Except her. Actually dying, she couldn't clean a motel room, do these things to get extra income she could hide to keep her bennies going.

So the idea Alice purveys is to reward the industrious--the person not disabled and dying, the one paying taxes this year. Isn't it? She 's not sure. Just isn't sure. Wonders if Alice is.

They check out at 11 a.m. and, because it's storming, spend the next four hours in the parking garage smelling auto exhaust and standing next to all their things and the big bags Alice had brought food in and asked Sherry to please save for her, all folded into one, no seat to sit on so standing the entire time. It kills Sherry's back, and carrying all the stuff has sent her pacemaker muscle into painful cramps, and her left hand, so recently paralyzed, can't lift a half-filled soda can again; it's going bad on her. Finally Alice pulls up, selfish to the end, making sure she alone retrieves them from their survivor experience so she can debrief them or see whatever it is about Sherry she's trying to learn from this thing.

"Did you have a good time? Did you ever go back in the pool and ocean after I left?"

"Of course," Sherry says."The whole time. We took a 4-mile hike down the beach at night ,too." She's beaming because this was a special moment for her. Never knew she could walk that far , now.

"Oh, I'm so jealous. Tell me," Alice says to little April,"Did your mom finally take my advice and make you a dinner table for you all to eat your sandwiches at?"

"No," April says , not having heard this one.

"No! Why not?" Alice sounds very upset.

"They wanted to eat on the beds watching tv with paper plates," Sherry puts in apologetically.

"Tv! You all watched tv? Did you see a lot of good movies?" Alice says it in conspiratorial fashion, like she sure hopes so.

"No," Sherry says loudly.

"No?" Alice says , still bent to April's head."Why not? I love to go to motels and just lay in bed and watch tv, don't you?"She coos to the innocent babe of the group.

"We don't really watch tv," Sherry says."We just watched one half-hour show, is all. We don't watch movies.And especially, a bunch of them--they're two hours long, as i'm sure you know."

"oh, yes," Alice says hesitantly."I know."

"Well, after all that swimming and walking four miles last night, I doubt there was two hours left to catch even one let alone a lot of movies," Sherry says nicely.. Good try though, you bitch.

Leave the needy to the faith groups, oh yeah--a winner idea, that. Don't tell any of them how complicit they are or what they are doing to the poor; just make sure they all think alike, that the poor would be fine but they don't know how to manage their money--

"Anyway," Alice says, as they head up the road for home,"I want to get you into a money management class, it costs $55. I'm going to pay it; but i was thinking, you know that gift memebership I gave you at the museum for Christmas? well, that was sad, really sad that you only used it once. I'd like you to call them and see if you can get a refund for the remaining 5 months on it. Then I'll use that to pay for this class I've enrolled you in.--"

"That's ok, really, Alice, I'll be dead before it starts," Sherry says.

Dehydration Hallucinations

"Nonsense. We're all going to die. I could die tomorrow in a car wreck. You can't think like that. Gotta have faith..."

"Faith in what, Alice?"

"In God. To take care of you." Alice's eyes are bugging out.

"Oh ," Sherry says."That went out ."

Now Alice doesn't know what to say. For all the good it does-- Sherry only lives another 5 days.

"I never dreamed--" Alice begins, when she enters the spartan little funeral home and spys the kids."I had no idea it would really be your last time swimming together. I hope she enjoyed it. I hope I helped you remember your mamma fondly, gave you some good memories of her, huh? Huh? Did I?"

April looks at Zoe.

"Darn it," Zoe says, smacking her forehead."We were so busy thinking of that poor maid--"'and then the girls dissolve, into giggling, into turning red from their audacity, into fleeing Alice, Alice all confused and innocently trying to help .Or whatever. They're not going to care less.

For Real

The reason why Sherry's Sherry and Alice 's Alice is because Sherry as you already guessed is capable of forgiving these people although not they of her so she's gotta be her or some people would

land directly in hell.

The End

.....