It was a crack whore that stole my mother's purse. She stole it from the graveyard where my mother's father is buried. She stole it right over the noses of all those poor dead bodies, all of them just waiting to be resurrected on the day of the glory of god. My late grandfather would be sorely disappointed.
My grandfather told me to always keep my hands clean. He slapped them at the dinner table in the middle of my eighth summer hot and sticky. He slapped the tops of my sandy hands; blistered from the monkey bars and told me cleanliness was next to godliness.
"On the day of judgment", he said, his mouth full of potatoes. "On judgment day God will choose the cleanest, most honorable people and you'll want to be in line with the best of them."
My grandfather was an honorable man with good cuticles. It was a shame his spirit had to watch my mother's purse stolen by a woman of sin during his time of final resting.
I was not there when it was stolen. My mother called me from the Hop-In payphone. She'd walked to the car to get the bouquet and American flag which she'd forgotten to put on my grandfather's grave and when she looked back, a woman was running away with her purse.
"It's a shame." My mother said, "The way people grow up these days. You'd think humanity had gone off the edge and is on its way to Armageddon the way people carry on."
I dreamt once of the Armageddon. People were running around trying to pack up their things before the end of the world came, as if it were a great tornado coming to sweep them up. I went outside and the sky was filled with bursting stars-great supernovas all over like fireworks. I could have watched those stars until the end, watching the whole universe expand and stretch.
I didn't get to stay with those stars though. I was sucked into a large elevator with strangers and my best friend. We were going down to Hell because of all the sinning we'd done on Earth and it was too late now to amend our ways. I tried to call my grandfather from the elevator phone but there was no service in the elevator since it was metal and deep in the middle of the earth. I don't know whether we made it dead or alive because I suddenly woke up.
They caught the woman at a bank. She was trying to cash a check she'd written to herself from my mother's flowered checkbook. She had used my mother's credit card too. She bought Virginia Slims and a handle of Jack Daniel's. She even used our gift card at Home Depot. Now why would anyone use an honest person's gift card? The police had been tracking her and captured her at the bank. She tried to run when she saw them coming but it was too late for her and her crack. She dropped the purse and when it hit the ground, out fell a bag of suspicious powder, some hand wipes and a stick of gum. The hand wipes must have been the crack whore's. At least her hands were clean.
My mother didn't want to go to the station to pick up her belongings so I went instead. The officer at the front desk was eating a slim fast bar and drinking a diet coke. His belly hung over his navy pants like a sagging balloon.
"Strange." He handed the purse to me. "I wonder what a crack whore on the run would want with a mop and two buckets from Home Depot."
"Oh yeah?" I said, not sure how to talk to a dieting policeman.
"Doesn't it seem out of character?" He continued.
"I don't know." I said getting a hand wipe from the purse. "I've never been a crack whore."