Sharpies to turn the wheelchair into a beautiful red beach chair and then added a little yellow sand pail as if the woman might get up and go hunt for shells any minute.
Paul said to slow down on the film, it’s getting hard to replace and thus very expensive. He says he will teach her how to “do digital and print,” which she has no idea about, but Abby does. Twelve years old and the child knows all about digital and print and all sorts of other things you might plug in that Sadie has never heard of. What will you do when the power goes out? Sadie has asked her, but nobody seems too worried about that. Sadie’s children all send her travel magazines and such and call so many times during the week she can’t keep up with it all. Paul wants her to move to where he is, but no, she keeps saying no; she says Horace is next door and this is her home. She did not tell them where to move and live and they owe her the same consideration. Paul is stubborn and keeps trying, but in the meantime he just reads every word of her monthly bill from Pine Haven, makes phone calls and asks lots of questions as she taught him to do and, of course, best of all, sends pictures of the children and all the brochures from conventions and retreats for ophthalmologists so she can send a customer anywhere in the world. There was even one trip advertised to go down the Amazon and she pulled it out to show Benjamin and Abby just the other day because he knows that The African Queen is one of her very favorite movies and he has promised to bring a copy for her to watch someday soon. Toby saw that photo and claimed it immediately because her whole room is decorated with her travels around the world, compliments of Exposure and Sadie’s skill as an illusionist, which is what Ben calls her. Just yesterday she took Stanley Stone’s photo and put him in the ring with a wrestler man he called the Undertaker, a horrible-looking big man with long stringy hair and ghoulish eyes. His picture was in a wrestling magazine Stanley’s son, Ned, had brought to him hidden in a bag. She doesn’t blame him a bit for hiding it.
“Stanley, how is Ned doing?” she asked while cutting and gluing.
“Okay, I guess. He’s teaching at your old school—weren’t you at Sandhills Elementary?”
“I was indeed except that one year they sent me to junior high. Forty years at Sandhills,” she said, so relieved to feel like the old Stanley was back. He was relaxed in the chair, his eyes closed. “You know, isn’t it funny how in life our paths didn’t cross too much. I mean if you needed a hammer, you went to our store, and I suspect if we’d needed your kind of legal advice we would have gone to you.” She had to pause to carefully cut out the Undertaker, who was so ugly it was frightening. He was one who might be served well to run into Lorice with her scissors, that stringy old mess of hair and Stanley is starting to look a little unkempt himself, though she is not quite ready to tell him that. “But we went to different churches and between my teaching and doing all I did at home, I didn’t venture very far so I really never knew Martha at all except to say hello at the store. I didn’t get to teach Ned; he was in Renee Bingham’s class, but I recall all the children saying how he made everybody laugh.”
“He was definitely the class clown. He had a hard time in those early years.” Stanley opened an eye and then it was like a switch flipped and something blew into him, and he sat up and started talking about the wrestling event he was going to have right there in the common room. He shook his fist and all signs of nice Stanley were gone. “I’m gonna take somebody out,” he said, and she waved her hand, tried to see if she couldn’t lure him back to where he had been. It just breaks her heart to see him this way. Sadie grew up with Stanley’s older sister, but he was several years younger so they ran in different circles. Still he was a person people heard about. “I remember