Things Are Not Always as they Seem

Pastor Randall Nathan, [Retard], had to fill in for Pastor Patty yesterday because Saturday afternoon she was called to fly to Bermuda to attend to her ailing mother.

Some folks thought this was strange, since her mother lives in Nebraska, and her former boyfriend, Chet Redzone, the Packers' running back, lives in Bermuda in the off-season, as anyone who works outdoors in Green Bay in the winter would logically do.

[Claire Nathan thinks Chet is a magician because she heard John Madden say that Chet ran around his own tight end. Claire is known throughout Periwinkle County as the "off" color commentator, and she doesn't know why.]

Everyone knows that Chet regularly shows up in PC to try to woo Patty back, even though she is married and has several children, which she usually refuses to number since there appears to be so many more on some days than on others. Patty says he is a stalker, and has nicknamed him "Celery," after the Bunnicula book, "The Celery Stalks at Midnight." She even went to court to get a restraining order against him, but when Judge Wesley Leatherhead found out who Chet was, which is always a little confusing, since he changed his name from Wetnight to Redzone in the middle of his career, and nobody in PC could understand why, the judge came down off the bench to get Chet's autograph and told Patty he was sure it was all a misunderstanding and that she should be grateful for attention from someone who could run around his own tight end.

[The judge knows Claire Randall and was instrumental in getting her a free lunch at The Bat Cage sports bar on NFL Sundays so that he and everyone else could hear her commentaries on the games.]

[The name is The Bat Cage instead of The Batting Cage, as one might suspect for a sports bar, because Lurleen Lostant, the owner and Romance novelist, keeps a cage of bats behind the bar to eat any mosquitoes that get in.]

Ophilia Banderville, Bessie's sister, was especially sure Sunday morning, and told everyone, that she knew for an absolute fact that Patty had abandoned her children and husband to run off to be with that handsome and muscular Chet Redzone. After all, everone knew her mother lives in Nebraska, and we know who lives in Bermuda, don't we? Restraing order, indeed. That was all a smoke screen. The only restraining order necessary was for the congregation to get one against their libidinous pastor. Just look at the facts and you can see the truth.

Randall Nathan heard all about this over lunch at The Buy Lingual Coffee and Language Store. He happens to know that Pastor Patty went to Bermuda to tend to her mother because her mother was on a cruise there when she got sick. So he went to see Zeke Domkowski.

He asked Zeke if he could borrow the 1956 Ford pickup Zeke uses for choring on his pig farm. Zeke has been trying to get Ophilia to go on a date for 13 years, but she refuses to ride in Zeke's truck. She also refuses to breathe when he is around. But Zeke is a kind-hearted soul and gladly loaned his truck to Randall Nathan, who waited until after dark, when everyone, especially Ophilia, was asleep, and he parked the truck in Ophilia's driveway, just across from The Mills of the Gods Coffee Parlor and Persimmon Pudding Center.

The next morning, after the breakfast crowd had gathered on the front porch tables of Mills of the Gods, he picked Zeke up, drove him down the alley behind Ophilia's house, hidden from the street by a tall stand of hollyhocks,and told him he could retrieve his truck from the driveway. Zeke walked out to his truck from behind Ophilia's house just as Ophilia emerged from the front door. Zeke heard her come out and waved and said, "Have a nice day, honey." By this time, everyone at the outdoor tables of Mills of the Gods was standing and applauding Zeke. Ophilia fled back into the house in horror.

Randall Nathan parked behind Mills, sat down with Kate Bates and Ben "Seymour" Bottoms, pulled out his cellphone, and called Ophilia.

"Things are not always as they seem," he said.