Rising stiffly to his feet, the young man opened the screen door, and went inside.
“Some biddy in a limo thinks that statue outside is magic,” he reported.
“The flower girl in blue?”
“Yeah. Said its name is Grace.”
“Could be. It’s a lawn ornament, like those dwarfs and garden gnomes or black boys holding lanterns for their bigots of white owners. I hate those things. And I detest the name Grace. Old fogey name. Like ‘Temperance’ or ‘Chastity.’ Gaaad, what a name! Call a girl Courtney, Xaviera, or Maxie. Empower her. You can’t be empowered with a name like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’ll throw the thing out next trash pick-up.”
As it happened, they forgot about the ‘lawn ornament,’ soon gathering dust in the garage, in their zeal to renovate the bungalow quickly, sell it for what turned out to be a spectacular profit, and move away, presumably back to California. The new owners, a childless ‘power’ couple, found her and put her at the kerb, face down, when they moved in, among the packing cases that had delivered all their worldly goods to their new address. She was rescued from the garbage by a neighbour across the street who had always lived there, and who spirited her away at nightfall. Curiously enough, he had been the very same Halloween prankster who as a mischievous teenager had taped a beer can to her open hand and then photographed her for the school yearbook. Repenting of his act before dawn, he had stealthily removed the beer can without any neighbours being the wiser. For years afterwards, he had thanked his lucky stars that he had never brought derision to the old couple by identifying the Blue Lady’s address in the yearbook . An elderly bachelor himself now, still living at home, he was later to encourage the few remaining children in the neighbourhood to search for Easter eggs in the flowerbed in front of the Blue Lady’s statue that he had set up in his own backyard, where she was to preside over much gleeful childish merriment and make an old man happy.
Only weeks after taking possession of the transformed bungalow, the new owners, with his-and-hers sports cars in the new double driveway in front of the garage where they kept their Jet-Ski, powerboat and Harley-Davidson, were aghast to return from bar-hopping downtown to discover that their ostentatious new home had burned to the ground in their absence. The Fire Marshall was apparently unable to discover the cause of the fire. The local press for a while speculated about arson, faulty wiring, rodents, lightning strikes and the like, until public opinion accepted the unproven explanation of an unspecified “act of God,” a phrase enthusiastically promoted by the insurance company involved. Once a couple of obscure academics began arguing in print—without irony—about “judicial proceedings,” presumably against God, the matter had become absurd, and rapidly faded from view. Rumour and Gossip, those handmaids to Unreliability, still have it that the new owners were never able to collect on their insurance policy.
The plot is now a little-used but spanking new neighbourhood park. And the Madonna is still being cared for in her new home, safe and serene as ever.
