On the Right Side of a Dream by Sheila Williams Page B

instead of mayonnaise, I called it quits. I just couldn’t think about food anymore.
    Millie Tilson was dead.
    I’d seen her last at Thanksgiving when I was in Paper Moon, Millie and her seventy-year-old “boy toy.” The town was still in an uproar about it. I think it might have been the age difference, as if any of us had been able to figure out what that
was.
Millie’s family had been sworn to secrecy.
    “Juanita, she would skin me like a red deer if I told you,” her nephew, Horace Patterson, had admitted sheepishly.
    Millie had been enjoying herself. She and Doc Hessenauer loved to gamble and went to Las Vegas for long weekends. They raced their convertibles (she in the Caddy, he in a neon yellow Boxster) on a small, out-of-the-way stretch of State Route 35 at the speed of light. Horace, a state trooper, could never catch them. They enjoyed “clubbing,” but that wasn’t easy in Paper Moon. The only place that loosely qualified as a “nightclub” was Em’s Place at the northern edge of town and that was because it was open at night and sold beer. So, Millie and the Doc spent Christmas in Cancun and New Year’s Eve in Palm Springs with friends from her Texas days. Montana was way too “provincial” for them. I like that word. I’ll have to look it up.
    “I want to go at lightning speed,” she’d told me once when she was in a philosophical mood. “Out in a flash, no lingering around in the hospital with bedpans or those morphine drips.” She’d waved her arms and the white boa-trimmed silk gown swished. “On to the next journey like the snap of a finger!” And she popped those well-manicured fingers loudly to emphasize her point. “And Juanita,” she instructed me, her eyes sharp, her expression serious. “Make sure that they do my nails and touch up my roots. I don’t want people looking into the casket whispering about how bad my hair looks! I’d like to be wearing my white Mainbocher suit, too, if you think you can remember.”
    Maine sashay? Maine bockshay? Whatever. I didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking so I quickly agreed to what Millie was telling me. I told her that I would remember to get her to shut up. I just didn’t think I would need to remember so soon.
    She and the Doc had been taking tango lessons.
    “I did the tango with General Peron once in Buenos Aires, the old fascist, but that was a few years ago,” Millie had said. “The Doc and I are talking about taking a cruise around Latin America.”
    One of her two-inch heels skidded on the polished floor at the dance studio and Millie went down. She wasn’t much bigger than a half second anyway and those bones cracked like dry twigs. It had to hurt but Millie laughed it off, at least that’s what the Doc said, until she tried to get up. That’s when he called the EMS squad.
    “All of that fuss!” Millie had told me later. She was very annoyed. “The noise and those damn lights blinking off and on. Such a to-do!”
    After the surgery, she couldn’t get up and move around right away (and not for lack of trying, you know Millie), so the bedpan became a part of her daily beauty ritual. “The ultimate indignity, Juanita,” she’d said. It was one of the few times that I ever heard her sigh or heard anything close to resignation in her voice.
    Millie was the patient from hell. People who have never been flat on their backs in their lives don’t take to hospitals. Four days in the hospital, four and a half weeks at a rehabilitation extended-care facility (≴Extended-care facility, my wrinkled ass,” Millie had grumbled. “It’s a damn old folks’ home!”), and then back to Paper Moon with a nurse. She would have spent more time in the rehab center but was discharged early. I later learned she was put out “due to bad behavior.”
Her
bad behavior. It wasn’t the wheelchair races in the halls or the poker games in the sunroom that were the problem, so Millie explained to me later, probably