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.Tacked to the doorframe was a recent notice to condemn.They were booting her out, finally, squeezing in another car wash or Taco Bell.Nelson knocked again.From inside came the faint sounds of shuffling and things knocked over.She was a mean old woman, he knew from the years delivering heating oil to her house.He’d ask about the mistletoe, she’d chase him from the yard, and that would end it; he would have his excuse for Myra.The latch on the door sounded.Through the window Mary Alice looked like a shrunken version of his memory of her, her hair fully white now and thinning, her apple-doll mouth puckered brown, her eyes a whitish blue.She swung the door open, looked at him through the dirty screen.“You here to see to those moles?”“Ma’am? No, I just wanted to ask you something.”“My daughter-in-law hates me,” Mary Alice said, her voice trailing to a mumble.As he leaned to hear her, Nelson noticed her smell, like creosote and attic trunks, and her feet, covered in men’s wingtip shoes bound with twine.“I bet she doesn’t hate you,” Nelson said.He didn’t know what else to say.“Do you know your oak tree is full of mistletoe?” Beneath thinning hair, her scalp was bright pink and spotted.“Just another parasite.That’s all there is anymore.Them moles, my daughter-in-law.The whole list.” A can of tuna fish sat open on the hall table behind her.“Looks like the county is on that list, too,” Nelson said.She squinted at him.“They mean to condemn your place and take it, ma’am.”She made a grunting noise.“Like to see that happen.See them try that again.”Nelson shrugged.“It’s not really a matter of trying.They just go on ahead.” He thumped the notice stapled to her doorframe.“What I wondered was if I could take some of that mistletoe out of your tree before they take it down with a bulldozer.”She frowned at him.“You get rid of those moles, you can take anything you want, except my dogs.They caught my asthma from me, you know.”“Ma’am, I’m not really here about your moles …” He stopped, not wanting to get into the whole thing again.She looked at him, blinking.He told her he would do what he could.As he climbed into his truck, he took another look at the clumps of mistletoe high in the tree.She pushed open the screen door to shout after him.“Don’t you put down any poison,” she said, her thin voice a wire stretched across the yard.“You’ll kill my dogs if you do.”“I’ve said it before, I think you should go,” Roxie said.She sat at her small desk, hands busy with changing the ribbon in her typewriter.Since her degree in English from the state college, she’d had a job writing captions for the Walter Drake household gift catalogue.So far this afternoon she had finished up descriptions of an electric callus remover and a bathtub safety seat.She was working on a sheepskin recliner cover when the ribbon went out.Nelson nodded, rubbed his face, finished his fried chicken.“She wants me to bring poison to the party.”“Poison?” Roxie looked at him.“Yeah, you know, the way other people bring beer.”“What poison?”Her told her about Myra’s request, about Mary Alice and the moles.She leaned her head on her typewriter, looking at him.“What are you going to do?”Nelson sighed.“I’m not going to kill my mother, Rox.Let her call what’s-his-name, that Dr.Death guy.Did he retire or something?”“In a way, though, it’s her last wish.It’s the last thing you could do for her.Giving her an easy death isn’t such a bad thing, Nelson.”“Don’t even start that.”She pulled her long braid across her shoulder, fingering it.“You talked to her doctors.You know what’s in store.It takes a long time, Nelson, and someday she won’t be able to chew.Won’t be able to talk or move or swallow.”Nelson held a bite of fried chicken in his mouth until the saliva pooling around it threatened to choke him.“At least go to her party,” Roxie said.“Her party.” Nelson shook his head.“You weren’t there for the first one.She went around telling everybody she’d rather have Babe Ruth’s disease, so she’d only have to deal with getting fat and drinking a lot.”Roxie smiled.“That’s not funny,” Nelson said.“Well, it isn’t and it is,” she said.“You can’t stop her from dying, honey.”That was the part he knew, that she would die, and that all she wanted with the mistletoe berries or the Hemlock Society or the books she read was a way to speed things up and make it happen sooner.But it was just wrong, somehow.He saw this early on in his business, when he first had the truck, how he tried to impress everybody by making deliveries early, but only messed everybody up.They couldn’t put the carpet down until the floors were finished, or had no place to stack bottles until the steel shelving was up.He learned to wait until it was time.Maybe tragedy had its own time, its own schedule, and to hurry it up would do nothing but compound it
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