Cindy shoved the truck into reverse and floored it backward into the house. Her tail lights entered the living room at just the place where Janice had been standing only a few moments earlier.
Janice later told the story to her therapist this way, “Well, I just wouldn’t be sitting here now if not for cheese balls.
“Virgil’s bowl was empty so I went to the kitchen to refill it. Then that maniac drove Virgil’s antique truck right through the wall! I hate to think what could have happened if I hadn’t seen his bowl was empty. I could have been hurt, maimed, or put in a coma!
“So I’m right thankful for cheese balls. Miracles wrapped in cheese powder, they are. I bet that maniac wishes she had some cheese balls.”
The therapist offered Janice a cheese ball from a large bowl on the coffee table. Janice smiled, took the bowl onto her lap, began idly munching, and moved on to the next subject. And that was the way with Janice, she’d avoid standing near exterior walls, but a few cheese balls and she was right as rain.
Cindy on the other hand, could not solve her problems with a few cheese balls. Unfortunately, though, she also couldn’t solve them by backing a truck through the wall of a house either, though it did improve her mood.
Cindy had been in a terrible car accident (before the one involving the house). The other driver had been late for a meeting, and believed normal driving laws should be suspended until such time as he was no longer late. Unfortunately, no one else got this memorandum, least of all Cindy. She had been attempting part three of a ten-point plan, recommended by a therapist on TV, to salvage her marriage. She had gotten off work early to surprise her husband with a night out at his favorite restaurant.
As Cindy turned left, the other driver disregarded the red light and smashed his Mercedes into the side of her two-week-old Nissan, totaling both cars in the process. The man walked away without a scratch. Cindy, however, had a helicopter ride to the hospital where they ushered her into the ICU. The doctors there pronounced her condition “touch and go.” She stayed “touch and go” for a few days until she settled into a coma.
Her husband, Virgil, mourned her for three weeks before finally asking the doctors to pull the plug. An old doctor resembling the cart driver and wearing a red shirt under his threadbare lab coat showed up to turn the respirator off. As the respirator stopped working, though, Cindy miraculously returned from her silent sojourn.
Virgil had mixed emotions about this miracle, however, as he had begun shacking up with Janice, his boss’s secretary. Sympathy and comfort had instigated the relationship, but the lonely man quickly turned things in another direction. Janice, for her part, equally quickly progressed from a shoulder to cry on to live-in-girlfriend; all while Cindy breathed through a machine.
Cindy’s full recovery, though miraculous, stretched on for eight long months. It would have been half that long if Virgil had not come in with papers for Cindy to sign two weeks into it. Virgil had found a loophole in his state’s insurance law that removed liability for her medical bills if their marriage had been dissolved by the day of discharge. He pushed her to sign the paperwork, and she, a recovering bundle of nerves and tears, signed away her marriage and any chance for financial security. With just one sister, a plane ride away—who was far too busy to visit more than once in eight months—she was on her own.
To Be Continued…
