Caroline Taylor's short stories have appeared in several online and print journals. She is the author of two mysteries, a forthcoming short-story collection, and one nonfiction book. Visit her at www.carolinestories.com.
Mrs. Morrison Throws Down the Gauntlet
Caroline Taylor
(Summer, 2017)
Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die.
“Good for her,” said Teddy when I’d repeated what our neighbor had told me after handing me a rhubarb pie to welcome us to the neighborhood.
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I said, as I rummaged through the drawer in search of a knife.
Teddy snorted. “Of course, it is—unless something you said somehow prompted her to—”
“—I gave her my name and yours and thanked her for the pie.”
“If she’s baking pies all day, then she is too busy.”
“Let’s taste it first,” I said, handing my husband a plate. “It could be from a grocery store, ya know.”
“Rhubarb? I don’t think so.”
The pie was delicious—a taste of long ago summers when Mama would bake so many rhubarb pies we nearly got sick of eating the stuff. While rinsing the plates, I realized I should take Mrs. Morrison something in return. I’m no pastry chef, so I filled her pie tin with a mound of oatmeal cookies, the ones I’d managed not to burn.
“Why, thank you,” she said when she answered my knock. She was a small woman, trim of figure, with short blondish grayish hair and a smudge of flour on the tip of her nose. “I do love oatmeal cookies, and I’m way too busy to bake them myself. In fact,” she laughed, “I’m too busy to die.”
There it was again. I didn’t know what to say, so I gave her a weak smile and a wave and turned to go.
“The book club meets here every Wednesday at ten,” she called out. “You are welcome to join us if you like.”
I turned back. “I’m afraid I work full time,” I said, “but thanks for the invitation.”
“I’ll be hosting the knitting circle on Saturday,” she said, before I could escape. “Do you knit?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said. Oh boy. This neighbor was going to be the kind who gave neighborliness a bad rep, a busy busybody who would always have one eye peeled and a ready invitation the moment she saw you.
I warned Teddy about her later on, after he’d come back from the hardware store.
He chuckled. “I was in there looking for the right-sized screws when I met the guy across the street. He tells me his wife now drives the car several blocks away from our neighborhood so she can run in peace. Every time she tried to go for a run on our block, Mrs. Morrison would collar her with some invite or, worse, a suggestion that she ought to do the book drive or the computers-for-the-kids fund raiser.”
I looked at the boxes we had yet to unpack. “I suppose it’s too late to move.”
“Hey,” said Teddy. “I’m not going to let some old biddy intimidate me.” He crossed his arms. “If she asks me to do anything, I’ll tell her to buzz off.”
“That’s kind of rude, don’t ya think?”
“Naw. It’s called honesty.”
Mrs. Morrison did capture my husband the following Sunday when he was mowing the back yard. It was something about joining the Elks, as her late husband had done.
“She wasn’t very happy when I told her I was too busy to consider it,” he told me afterwards.
“Gave me one of those looks you used to get in grade school when the dog ate your homework.”
Mrs. Morrison was too busy bothering folks to tend to her own business, it seemed. Her gutters needed cleaning, her shrubs pruned, her trim painted, things normally handled by a man. “Why don’t you offer to help?” I said to Teddy one day. “She needs it, and maybe she’ll reward us with another pie.”
Bless his heart, Teddy took me up on the suggestion, mostly because, I believe, guys just like to do guy things. Mrs. Morrison was duly appreciative, too, and it seemed we could settle into an arrangement where I mostly avoided her and Teddy occasionally offered to help when the chore could use a man.
By then, we’d learned that the woman had told everyone she met that she was too busy to die. A lot of the neighbors found this hilarious, including us. Not only were we all too busy to die—especially the families with children—we were pretty sure death was not lurking anywhere nearby, in both the spatial and temporal senses.
Mrs. Morrison was busy, no doubt about that. Her good works did not go unnoticed by the town fathers, who decided to give her an award for “outstanding community service.” All her neighbors and friends were invited to the ceremony, with much speculation among us as to whether she’d say “I’m too busy to die” in her acceptance speech. By the eve of the ceremony, the odds were running one to nine.
The event never happened, however. It turned out that Mrs. Morrison was not too busy to die. On the day of the event, an official sent to pick her up and drive her to the ceremony wound up calling the police when she didn’t answer her door. Apparently, she’d fallen down the stairs and cracked her head open on the polished oak floors of her foyer.
It seemed that practically everyone in town attended Mrs. Morrison’s funeral. They even had to set up chairs in the parish hall and hook up a closed circuit TV for the overflow crowd. Teddy and I and several other neighbors had arrived early enough to find seats at the back of the church. I looked around at them, feeling pretty sure I knew exactly what a few were thinking, mostly because I shared those thoughts: “At last, I no longer have to keep an eye out for that intrusive busybody.”
The mayor himself delivered the eulogy. It turns out that poor Mrs. Morrison had not had the best of lives. Her daughter was run over and killed at the age of ten. Her son later died of an illness suspiciously related to the Gulf War. Her husband succumbed to a heart attack. Instead of letting these terrible things swamp her in hopeless misery, Mrs. Morrison had turned to good works.
The mayor then proceeded through a laundry list that ran the gamut from the annual bake sale and book drive to feeding the homeless to knitting baby clothes for impoverished mothers to the race for the cure and finally various refugee relief efforts. As he was doing this, my face grew hot and my head light, not because of the eulogy’s length but because of its content. What had I ever done to help a stranger?
Ted grabbed my clammy hand. “You okay, honey?” he whispered.
“We were wrong,” I said.
“What?”
“All of us.” I gestured at the neighbors sitting on either side of us. “We thought she was just patting herself on the back when she said she was too busy to die.”
“Well, sure.”
“We were wrong, Ted. She was issuing a challenge.”