Patience was always a sucker's game.
The way Corrine Tedros saw it, the meek could take their places, dutifully line up, and patiently stand there until eternity tapped them on the shoulder and Judgment Day rolled around, but the only portion of the earth that they would ever lay claim to or ever call their own was the portion that had been, and forever would be, embedded beneath their fingernails.
Corrine understood the difference between patience and waiting.
Sunday afternoons, however, were a different story. Corrine felt as if she were trapped within a single moment, the same one opening and unfolding over and over again, ten months of Sunday afternoons in Magnolia Beach, South Caroline and having to sit across the dining room table from her husband’s uncle, Stanley Tedros, Stanley wearing the same brown suit and starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the neck each week as he held court, shoveling food and talking at the same time.
It wasn’t a pretty sight, and for that matter, neither was Stanley. A gnome, that’s what he reminded Corrine of. One of those ceramic lawn ornaments. You could stick him in somebody’s front yard, and nobody would know the difference.
By all rights, Stanley should have been in the ground years ago. He was old, his odometer clocking 85, and when Corrine had married Buddy, ten months before, she had assumed, erroneously as it turned out, that Stanley wouldn’t be around for long.
Stanley liked to tell everyone he was too busy to die.
