Ellington

“Help! Please help!” I plead in a muffled voice as I pound lightly on the old wooden door. “Help! Help get me out of here!”

I panic. I grab the doorknob and shake—nothing. I try the lock again, but the half-moon crescent keeps going round and around between my fingers.

“Help!”

I am locked inside the women’s bathroom at a funeral home in Atlanta.

How can I scream without other mourners thinking it could be their loved ones screaming from their casket? I can’t scream. What can I do? How do you scream for help in here! I am not going to make it out of here for the funeral! I keep uttering a muffled plea. Help! Help! Get me out of here!

I am going to miss my father-in-law’s funeral. This is bad—real bad.

The funeral home is stately and old, and the ladies room is tiny. I locked the two doors between the large hallway and me. How will anybody ever hear me?

Suddenly, I hear the hinges creak as the first door opens. “Thank you, thank you! Oh, I am so glad someone came in here, I am locked in the bathroom.”

I hear the heavy click of men’s dress shoes on the checkerboard marble floor. A brief second of embarrassment flushes through me that a man is in the ladies room. But then I think, “Oh, good. One of the funeral directors found me. He can get me out.”

“Thank goodness, you found me!” I say. “I was thinking I was going to miss my father-in-law’s funeral. Thank-you for hearing me.”

“Click” goes the lock as I see the lock turn and finally catches in place.

Thank you again for this,” I say as I swing open the door. “I can’t thank you enough

for …”

I stand in the front part of the women’s bathroom that has only enough room for a sink and one person. The main door to the hall was closed and locked. There was no one there. Was it my father-in-law who let me out so I would not miss his funeral?

I ran back to the chapel. The organ was playing. The service had not officially started, yet, as I sat down on the pew next to my husband.

“Dean, Dean, you will never guess what happened in the bathroom,”

I whispered.

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said … and in the eight years of our marriage, he never let me tell him what happened that day.

Another nail was hammered into my marriage’s coffin the day we buried my father-in-law—I just didn’t know it, yet.