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before her other senses had a chance to
completely awaken. This allowed each sense to face the day in a much better
mood than they might have, stone sober.
    She had just gotten started in earnest when she received the
call about Nolte. She had been sipping and wondering about the buttery goodness
of beer, as she often did during her first few beers when her sister had called
with the disturbing news, but truth be told, being told of Nolte's long-awaited
demise did nothing but enhance the buttery flavor.   She did, however, feel a smidge guilty over
the momentary joy the news had raised in her. Usually, any interruptions to her
early morning buttery contemplations would have immediately turned her into a
bitch on wheels, but this news seemed to have a buttery flavor, all its own.
With that being said, she realized she would have to mourn soon in spite of all
things buttery.
    Of course Alice knew there wasn’t any butter in beer, she
had read the list of ingredients on the side of the can many times and butter
was never listed, but she could taste it. It was probably just some magical
reaction with the chemicals. Alice was no scientist, but she was well aware of
magical reactions and how mysterious they could be, one of her fondest memories
was a scientific wonder, a vinegar and baking soda volcano she had made in
school. She didn’t understand it then, nor did she understand it today, but she
respected it. She knew there was no butter in beer, but that made it all the more
special in her book. Two or more ingredients not found in butter, mixed
together, more likely than not, by accident, in the olden days, had created a
buttery flavor. Some of the more amazing scientific discoveries of all time had
been accidents, though, she couldn’t remember the details, she was pretty sure
Henry Ford discovered the car on accident.  
      She found it odd that
she was the only person, that she could name, who could taste the flavor of
butter, because it was there, sure as sunshine. She knew it didn’t take a rock
scientist to understand what taste buds were saying.
    It gave Alice great pleasure to contemplate such mysteries,
and this was one of her favorites, but now wasn’t the time for pleasurable
reflection on scientific wonders and magical reactions, Nolte was dead. Now was
a time for sadness and mourning. It was a time for contemplating one’s own
mortality; it was also time for another beer.
    “Ding dong, the witch is dead. Long live the witch!”
    Alice had been waiting for this day for a very long time. It
had, in fact, been such a long time coming, that she had actually begun to
think that Nolte had cut a deal with the devil, somehow managing to turn
terminal cancer into a nothing more than a chronic illness. To her dismay, he’d
beaten the odds and made it several months past the three to four, the doctors
had given him. Even the doctors were baffled by his defiance of their
prognosis; one had even mentioned to her, that his drinking alone should have
killed him. It was like he had been flat out refusing to die, just to make
Alice miserable.
    There had been times when the waiting had become unbearably
frustrating. More than once, the thought of slipping the asshole a little
something, that might help him along, had crossed her mind. Just a bit of a
nudge to help nature take its course, nothing sinister or devious, just a bump
in the right direction, but the thought of prison terrified her. The caretaker
was always the one; cops focused their brutal interrogations on first, right
after the immediate family, of course. She happened to be both. This was not an
unfounded concern, due to the amount of crime television Alice digested on a
daily basis; she was quite familiar with the method of operations homicide
detectives employed.
    Though the hands-on caretaking had fallen mostly on her
sister’s shoulders, since Martha lived closer to Nolte, Alice felt her
contributions were not without merit, as far as caretaking was