Last Dance, Last Chance

contest; Ralph and Lauren came before anything else.
    “He won’t be back, Denis,” she said. “I don’t want him here any more.”
     
    Then, something miraculous happened. “In the month of October, I’ll never forget this,” Debbie recalled, “I was lying in my hospital bed, and I moved one of my fingers. I lifted one of my legs. I was screaming out to the nurses, who then started screaming for the doctors that ‘Deb is moving her fingers—she’s moving her legs!’ Everyone was ecstatic. Even the nurses were crying.
    “I fought as hard as I could to regain my functions, but I knew I had a long way to go,” Debbie remembered. “I was transferred to the rehab floor once again, where I worked so hard every day to try to walk again, to try to feed myself.”
    It was Debbie’s women friends who rallied around her—not just Rose Gardner, but also Shelly Palombaro, who had become a close friend. Shelly would become the person who made the difference in Debbie’s being allowed to live at home again, rather than languish in a nursing home designed for the elderly.
    Shelly and Rose were very different, but they were both extremely loyal friends. Rose was very proper, wore her dark hair pulled tautly back from her un-madeup face, and had a very soft, precise voice. She was devoted to her religion, and she was stubborn. Shelly spoke loudly and firmly, wore her hair in sometimes outrageous styles in wild colors, with lipstick to match, but she was stubborn, too.
    Like Sharon Simon, they understood that Debbie didn’t need anyone judging her or giving her advice. Both Rose and Shelly could understand why Debbie still clung to a relationship with Anthony, even though it was probably a relationship that had never really existed beyond Debbie’s hopes. Although they didn’t like him, Debbie had loved him for such a long time.
    “He was her husband,” Rose said. “For all those years, she wanted to believe in him.”
    Debbie’s survival was a miracle; nobody denied that. She should have died her first week in the hospital. That she survived was very impressive, even to toxicologists who usually based their conclusions on scientific theories. Nobody could have that much arsenic in their system and live. But Rose had been faithfully saying the Novena of the Little Flower of St. Therese, a special Catholic prayer. St. Therese has been elevated to a doctor of the Church, and Rose prayed to her for Debbie’s recovery. Rose had also enrolled Debbie in a prayer chain so that she would be prayed for constantly by the Carmelite Sisters.
    By the beginning of August, when her hold on life was the most fragile, Debbie had scores of people who didn’t even know her praying for her. Rose considered her recovery a miracle, and no scientists spoke up to disagree with her.
    Like Rose, Shelly insisted upon visiting Debbie in the hospital. “I only knew her from the boys’ football games,” Shelly recalled, “and I can’t explain why I had such a strong need to go to her. She was just a customer in my shop, but when she came to my house a week before she went to the hospital I just knew something was wrong. I had to go see her in the hospital.”
    Actually, Shelly probably knew Anthony better than she did Debbie. Her terrific figure was partly Anthony’s handiwork. “He gave me breast implants,” Shelly said. Although she had an uneventful recovery, she had never cared much for Anthony. She cut his hair, but there was always something about him that grated on her. During that fall of 1999, while Debbie was still in the hospital, Shelly watched Anthony once during a football game played in a drizzling rain.
    “There was something wrong with him,” she said. “I didn’t know if it was alcohol or what—but he was on something. I actually called the West Seneca Police because he was acting so strange, and I knew that part of his probation said that he couldn’t drink or do drugs. They told me, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re watching him. Let him hang himself.’”
    Shelly was a little surprised at their response, but then she realized she wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on Anthony.
    One of the coaches in the league where Ralph played football remembered a game night when it poured down rain; it might have been the same night that Shelly watched Anthony.
    “I had mentioned loudly that the sidelines were so muddy that I needed some boots,” the coach said. “Anthony was on the sidelines within hearing