Driveway to Heaven
Yesterday was going along fine as late Thursday mornings go. I was talking to a friend who was bitching about how his dog keeps digging up his yard.
“This wouldn’t happen if you had a cat,” I reasoned, invoking the irrefutable kind of logic commonly associated with two-thousand-year-old Greek men.
A new iMessage alert appeared in the upper right-hand corner of my laptop screen. Probably typical early May Thursday morning stuff, like a reminder that school shootings are old hat or a John Oliver “Cool” GIF (or the latter commenting on the former).
“Have you heard from Sue today?” my mother texted me.
“No. Everything alright?” I sensed something was wrong.
“A woman was found dead in her driveway this morning. Sue’s house can be seen in the picture. They said it’s a middle-aged woman.”
“Holy fuck!” I wrote back before imploring Harry not to floor it to Sue’s house just yet. “Let me call her.”
Being the Luddite that she is, Sue refuses to keep her cellphone within arm’s reach while she’s working. After her phone predictably went to voicemail, I called the nursery where she works twice, but it too concluded with voicemail both times.
I quickly changed into formal wear—black sweatpants replaced my plaid blue pajama bottoms—and drove with conviction. Despite my contempt for coupes, I’d never wanted to locate a two-door automobile in a parking lot more than this Thursday morning. Pacing around the rock-laden grass-and-dirt lot for about half a minute, I was devastated by the lack of that damn Toyota Celica. In true clichéd fashion, it was sitting in the last space I checked before—apologies for invoking the clinical term—losing my feces.
After doing a lap around all of the greenhouses—why was Sue playing so hard to get with proof of her corporeal existence?—I walked to the retail cash register and said hello to Shelly, Sue’s boss, a woman I’d previously met.
“Is Sue here?”
“Which one?”
Because why wouldn’t I want to stop by and ignore Sue to speak with her co-worker Susan?
“The one I’m going to kill for not telling me she’s alive,” I wanted to say.
“Rainbow Bright,” Shelly emotionlessly intoned into her walkie talkie. “What is your location? Adam is here to see you.”
About a minute later, Sue appeared in a maroon shirt and jeans, her hair up in a swirl that resembled a pink and purple soft serve twist, waving at me with her trademark giddiness as she approached.
“News of my death has been greatly exaggerated!” she told me. “I said that earlier today but forgot the last word of the line. Luckily, a customer helped me finish it.”
“Unlike how I’m not gonna need help to finish strangling you,” my retroactive inner wiseacre daydreamed about saying when I mentally replayed the exchange later.
I can’t remember what I said while hugging her. I was too relieved to retain thoughts. She mentioned how Nichole (her best friend) and Lynn (her cousin) had called earlier, prompting her to comment to Shelly, “I wonder if my boyfriend cares…” Sue knew I never checked the local news and planned on telling me about the incident once she arrived home, making sure to tiptoe over the (I’m assuming) pools of plasma and chunks of bones near the bed of tulips in bloom beside her driveway. Within minutes, my heart rate calmed down and I pointed at a piece of crud on her face, picking it off and inspecting it to make sure it wasn’t cadaver DNA. I suggested that she text a couple other friends before they incurred the near psychotic breakdown I’d just endured; she waited until later and one friend came by her house poised to cry enough tears to wash away the chalky outline beside her porch. Aware that due to her continued commitment to breathing air Sue had soil to seed, we said goodbye after parting remarks on the surreal happenstance, but not before she divulged how the police asked for her phone number “just in case.”
“You don’t have a cellphone?” Officer Knows-Sue’s-Alive asked her after she gave him her landline.
“No.”
It might’ve been a lie, but good luck getting a live human being on the horn either way.