The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (14 page)

Well, maybe
I
couldn’t. But Bernadette
could.
If she ever got the chance to be alone with the man.

“So, looks like Bernadette invited the whole church to participate in our council meeting.” I clapped my hands together and began to hustle around the fellowship hall with all the enthusiasm and misdirected charm of that Sammy selling balloon rides on market day. “Which calls for a little bit of last-minute—”
sabotage
“—creativity on our part.”

“Creativity? Is that just your polite way of saying hard work, Odessa?” I could see it in Maxine’s eyes. My footloose and fabulous sandwich plan would have suited her just fine about now.

“We’ll need more agendas.” I waved one of the pages from the file I had stashed by my purse. For once, I had actually intended to get some things done at one of these meetings, and I didn’t see any reason not to take advantage of the situation to double my efforts. “Many hands make light work. If we have a large enough gathering today, we can knock out all these concerns and have the whole flea market issue addressed in no time. Jan should really be here for this, since she instigated it. I hate the thought of doing it without her.”

“You’ll have to do it without me, too.” Gloria stood there in her elegant outfit with her head cocked and her arms crossed. She knew I was up to something, and this was her way of letting me know she would support my folly in theory but didn’t want her name attached to it. “I have another engagement.”

“Well, Gloria, you know us. We’re all for engagements. Aren’t we, Reverend?”

“You are a dangerous woman, Mrs. Pepperdine,” he muttered with a gleam in his eyes.

“All women are dangerous in some way, Reverend. You’ve just got to learn to separate the sinfully dangerous ones from those of us who are dangerous in a good way. Because those ones are worth getting to know.”

“Can I get a big
Amen
on that?” Maxine said as she pulled fistfuls of flatware from a wide kitchen drawer.

“Amen!” I chimed in, only to have the elder Mrs. Alvarez outdo me in both volume and gusto. Still chuckling, I leaned close to whisper to Gloria. “Speaking of dangerous, what about Bernadette?”

Gloria sighed. “Dangerous to herself, I suspect. Dangerous to her own chances of finding a man who could value her, servant’s heart and all.”

“No, I mean,
where
is she?”

“She’s pulling her van around to the back door so she can unload all the food she brought,” Gloria said.

“Good. Maxine, you go help Gloria and her mother-in-law.” Maxine, no stranger to church politics or to my tone when I’ve stopped fooling around and gotten down to business, did not argue. Next, I focused my attention on the
real
main dish at today’s event. “Reverend Cordell?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Not a question. Not a snappy, military-style reply meant to belittle me by making me out to be a dictator. Just simple and plain, self-assured but not self-important. Willing, but wily in his own way.

I liked the man more and more every time I crossed paths with him. Good minister material, I thought. Not to mention good husband material.

If only he could meet up with the right girl…and drive off with her before all the other potential right girls showed up.

I smiled big, and crooked my finger to bring him closer. “I have an assignment for you.”

Twenty minutes later, I was gazing out at eighteen female faces. Eighteen pretty and powdered faces, and every last one of them, save Maxine’s, pouting over having to sit there and listen to me talk about the flea market instead of making small talk with a certain single minister.

“First, I can’t say enough how pleased I am with this tremendous turnout. It’s inspiring, is all it is. Wouldn’t you say so, Maxine?”

“Inspiring,” she deadpanned. For a second, I thought she might even throw in a yawn.

“Now, the complaints about the flea market can be broken down into three categories. Those of aesthetics and health.” I pointed to a pile of papers filled with tirades calling the drive-in-turned-weekend-marketplace a pigsty and all sorts of other names that basically meant pigsty. Most of those them bore Jan’s signature, and the ones that didn’t bore her signature attitude. But to be fair, there was also plenty of uneasiness about the general upkeep of the old movie screen. And serious questions regarding the condition of the
portable toilets that lined the lot. And issues with the mess left behind when old newspapers, advertising flyers and food wrappers that hadn’t made it to the Dumpster littered the streets and were picked up by the Texas wind and scattered around town.

“A second valid concern people have regarding the flea market involves commerce and our community. How can we make sure the sellers follow through by paying their taxes, for example? And wondering about the impact these transient merchants have on local business.”

No one was listening to me. I knew it. They knew it. But the thing I knew that they didn’t know was that I had lived most of my life not being listened to. It had come with the job of being married to a man who was wedded to his calling. I was used to it. I could stand here all day and blahblah-blah and they could yawn and fidget and play with their food, and for me it would be like just another afternoon at home with my sweet but preoccupied hubby.

“And last, and probably the most troubling—” this time I gathered the last few pieces of paper and smacked them against my open palm “—we do have some reports of criminal activity.”

That got their attention.

A buzz went through the room.

Then everyone clasped their eyes on me.

“Bring it on home, Sister Pepperdine,” Maxine muttered under her breath.

And suddenly I wished I had prepared a big finish for this whole speech. That I had scrounged around and gotten together a few choir members with a set of drums and some tambourines to stand behind me and deliver the straight but
simple message I had arrived at after looking over the material in my hands today.

Instead, I just smiled weakly and offered a one-shouldered shrug. “And it is my recommendation that this action council should compel the city council to work with existing statutes and resources to improve the overall appearance and community goodwill and public safety at the Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market.

“Oh, no. Not good enough, not nearly good enough!” Jan Belmont, wearing a white jogging suit and the red heat of anger in her cheeks, stormed into the room and up to my makeshift podium. “I did not drop everything and come over here for this meeting to hear that
that
is your plan.”

Maxine turned to me and frowned. “Drop everything? What did she drop?”

“The bomb, I think.” And just that fast, Bernadette was standing at my elbow, whispering, “And she dropped it on her husband. When we got there, she was packing her bags.”

“No!” Maxine followed Jan as the prim woman snatched up one of the stacks of paper I had used in my talk and began waving it about.

While Jan launched into a full-blown diatribe about the low-down dirty drive-in and all the questionable goings-on going on right under our noses, I looked around. Something had gone on right under my nose, it seemed. The kind of thing that could totally play havoc with my plan—my
real
plan, not the one about the flea market.

“Where is the Reverend Cordell?” I asked the tall, flush-faced girl at my side.

“I didn’t think it was right that we have Jan here and not go get Chloe, too, so we ran by the tattoo parlor.”

“Is that an answer?” I kept one eye on Jan. “I don’t think that’s an answer, Bernadette.”

“Chloe wasn’t there,” she said.

“
Where
is the Reverend Cordell?” I asked again.

“He…” Bernadette turned to me and bent down to whisper in my ear, as if anyone could hear a word she said over Jan ranting about mud holes and people who frequented them being no better than pigs. Pigs were a recurring theme with Jan, it seemed, and a very big deal. “Chloe wasn’t at the tattoo parlor,” Bernadette murmured so only I could hear, “because Sammy stole her car!”

“With her in it?” I was trying to make sense of it all.

“No. Sammy hot-wired her car while she was working.”

“And the Reverend? Is he in his office, or…”

Bernadette ignored my obsession with Jake, which I took as a very bad sign. “So she took off in the tattoo parlor guy’s car to try to find Sammy before he did something crazy.”

“Abner?” I tried to visualize the man with the braid and the heart after God and his role in all this.

“Who?” Bernadette blinked.

Jan’s voice rose, and she waved the pages in her clenched fist for emphasis.

“Abner, the tattoo parlor guy,” I said. “He wasn’t the one you thought would do something crazy, was he?”

“Him? Oh, no. I thought he was sort of sweet.” Bernadette smiled. “And so Jake…”

I stopped her there. “He told you to call him Jake?”

“He, uh, yes, he said I could. Actually, he said I
should,
because it would break your heart if we got back and weren’t on a first-name basis.”

“He’s on to you, Odessa.” Maxine had gotten to her feet
and was huddled behind us, probably as much to prepare for a speedy exit when Jan finished as to hear what we were talking about. “He hasn’t stayed single this long without learning a few tricks.”

“He dropped me off at Jan’s and took off to try to find Chloe before anyone—except the tattoo-parlor guy—does anything crazy.”

“And that’s why we cannot just let this be and hope for the best,” Jan was saying. She slapped the papers down on the table one last time, faced the crowd and folded her arms. “We must get involved. We must do the right thing.”

And that was that.

Meeting adjourned.

I did not announce that it was adjourned. It just happened.

Like everything else I had so carefully planned for, it had just slipped through my fingers and out of my control. My lamb was lost, the lovers were parted. The single minister was on the loose, and Bernadette was once more stuck cleaning up after everyone else at the church.

I could take that only one way.

“Maxine, I think the Lord is telling me something.”

“Go home with your best friend and consume mass quantities of chocolate?” she asked, hope sparkling in the depths of her sweet brown eyes.

“I’m afraid not,” I said, tugging at her sleeve and heading for the door.

Yes the matchmakers and yentas and moms who push and prod—they’ve always been around. Can you blame them? The job of keeping romance alive is a full-time thing, and the way some people behave, there will never be a shortage of work for those who hope to ease the way.

H
ow do you know when enough is enough? When it is time to let go of a hand stretched out to you in need? It’s a delicate thing, not giving too much. Especially when you
want
to give so much.

There is that story about the person who frees the butterfly from the cocoon, only to find that the poor thing will never be able to fly. It needed the struggle of breaking free to strengthen its wings enough to support it in flight. If there were ever three people who deserved wings, who deserved to be able to soar, those three people were Chloe, Bernadette and Jan.

But how do you know when you’ve done enough? And what do you do if you’re afraid that nothing you do is going to make any difference?

“Maybe it’s time we faced the truth, Maxine.”

We were
not
running away. The meeting was over and
our part in it was done. It is not my fault that all those silly women showed up hoping to impress the new minister with their upright, unselfish civic-mindedness and their scalloped potatoes with corn flake topping. So I saw no reason to stick around to do their dishes or listen to them…I believe the term I’ve seen used in the Bible is
murmur.
But in Texas we call it bellyachin’, at least if we were raised right and have both the good manners and the religious grounding not to use swearwords.

Whatever term one might use to describe the grumblings going on in the fellowship hall, I wanted no part of them.

I didn’t have to ask Maxine twice if she was ready to hit the road, either. We tried to get Bernadette to come along, but…well, by now you can guess how that turned out.

That’s how me and Maxine ended up in my truck, aimed in the general direction of the Alvarezes’ mail box. Not that I intended to run over those nice people’s mailbox, but I was going to hand over all the complaints on file, my suggestions, and the short and not-too-helpful notes from the meeting.

Jan was starting her own action council, dedicated solely to the action of closing down the flea market. Our recommendation would be to work within the system to better the place and integrate it into the community. We could not both win. Like they used to say in those old westerns, this town wasn’t big enough for the both of us.

Things had gone past folks working together, and now it was going to take nothing short of a crisis to get everybody to put their personal feelings aside and deal with things reasonably. A crisis. Really. That’s the kind of world we live in these days, isn’t it? A world that thrives on sen
sationalism and loves a good scandal. The Five Acres of Fabulous Finds scandal would either come when something bad did happen on the grounds, or when Jan got a serious campaign to close the place going and something bad happened to
her.
Death threats, maybe, or a good pelting with rotten eggs.

And before you decide that egg thing wouldn’t be so awful, consider this—this is Texas, where people have been known to make death threats over cheerleading spots. But rotten eggs, on a woman like Jan? Especially if they ran a photo of it in the local paper? If Jan followed through on this, things would get ugly, and one of those things might be Jan herself.

“Face the truth?” Maxine snapped me back from the image of Jan picking shells out of her freshly frosted hair, dark yellow yoke dripping from her chin onto her pristine cotton top from Talbots. “Odessa, girl, I don’t recall a time when
I
ever turned my back on the truth.”

“All right, then, admit defeat.” I slowed my truck down while I tried to think of the quickest way to get from the church to the neighborhood outside town where the Alvarezes lived.

“Defeat? You’ve got me there again, girl. I didn’t realize you and I had actually gone into battle.”

“There’s a lesson in there about putting on the full armor of God, but I tell you, Maxine, I am just too downtrodden this afternoon to try to piece it together.”

“
Downtrodden?
You? A little of the air has maybe been taken out of your hair, but
downtrodden?
Not Odessa Pepperdine.”

I hit the brakes. Stop sign. Which I took as an invitation
not just to stop, but to stay a while. One hand on the wheel, I shifted around enough to face my friend and ask, “You really think so?”

“I know so.”

“Has my hair really gone flat? Because I took three full passes over it with Deluxe Extra Hold on my way out the door heading for the meeting.” I took advantage of our sitting there to grab the rearview mirror and check it out. I pushed down on the platinum blond bubble. I know I told Chloe never to push, but this was different. This was a test push, not a trying-to-alter-the-shape-of-the-style push. After
this
kind of push, the hair springs back. Sort of. “I knew I should have stopped in the church bathroom to refluff.”

“Oh, honey, with that crowd, if you had stopped long enough to tease so much as your bangs…”

“My bangs? Not them, too!” Panicked, I glanced in the side mirror to get a fresh angle.

“I was saying that if you had stopped in that bathroom for anything, those ladies would have locked you in the stall and not let you out until you told them who Chloe was and why
their
single minister was chasing after her instead of being at the church, ooohing and ahhing over their wife-to-be candidate’s lemon bars or fiesta casserole.” Maxine rubbed her temple. “Believe me, the fact that we got out of there with any hair at all is a testament to our flea market shopping skills.”

“Flea market shopping skills? How so?”

“Stealth, Odessa, stealth.” She sent her hand gliding through the air in a smooth, enigmatic gesture. “We’ve learned to get in, get what we’re after and get out again, without alerting anyone to the fabulousness of our finds.”

“Except we didn’t find anything today but disappointment.” I slumped in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel. “Maybe we should just stick to treasure hunting. Finding eggbeaters and aprons. That’s all I seem to be good for, anyway.”

“Oh, now, I won’t hear that kind of talk, Odessa.”

I gave her a weak but appreciative smile.

She squared her shoulders and looked straight ahead. “You have
never
been any good at finding aprons.”

I whipped my head around. She wasn’t grinning, at least not with her lips, but oh, her eyes did have that special Maxine twinkle.

“All right. I get it. I don’t have any call to go around feeling sorry for myself.” I drove on, turning onto the curving country road that led out of town, to the Alvarez home and then…then…then what?

I had no idea where to go. It was early afternoon in the middle of the week. The flea market wasn’t open. We’d already had lunch, and both of our husbands were probably sacked out on their respective couches, content as all get-out to be left alone to “watch” TV with their eyes shut.

That right there pretty much summed up my prospects these days. Shop. Eat. Try to get my husband off the couch.

I sighed. “It’s just that…chairing this committee, lending support to Jan, cleaning Chloe up, playing cupid, it all gave me a sense of accomplishment. It made me feel that I hadn’t used up all my usefulness quite yet. That I wasn’t the big-haired-granny-lady equivalent of an eggbeater or apron.”

Maxine touched my arm. “But we love eggbeaters and aprons.”

I exhaled and took one hand from the wheel just long
enough to give her fingers a pat. “We do, but nobody else even knows what they are for, Maxine. They see them as just worthless junk.”

The gentle touch on the arm turned into a smack on the flab—you know, that flabby upper part that goes south after a certain age. Bring the back of a bare hand down on that lovely body part and the sound it makes is part
pop,
part
flap. Plap
. I have to mention that because it gives the flavor of Maxine’s outrage. She wasn’t being abusive, but she did get my attention. And she didn’t leave it at a
plap
on the flab, either.

“Odessa Pepperdine you are
not
worthless!” She said, it coming out all rushed and indignant. “You are
not
junk!”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence, Maxine, but I can’t help but look at what I set out to do here, to get Bernadette a date, to show Jan another point of view, to break beneath Chloe’s hard exterior…”

“I don’t know about her hard exterior, but you did get her to fix up her hair. That should count for something.”

“One out of three.” I held up my index finger and pushed out my lower lip in a good old-fashioned sulk and said, “Not a very good record. I just thought I would have done better, that I’d have made more headway towards my goals by now.”

“And it
is
all about your goals, isn’t it?” Maxine pointed to a car pulling out from a side road as her way of warning me to stay sharp. Maxine likes to think of herself as my eyes and ears on the road, and I guess my ego-detector everywhere else. “Never mind what they want for themselves, or even what the Lord might really have planned, as opposed to what you wish He had in store.”

“I only want the best for them.” The truck bumped along. The Alvarez family lived in a subdivision just off a dusty old road that formed a semicircle on the south side of Castlerock. One day this would all be nice big houses, a new grocery store, maybe a country club or golf course. But now, not many people took this particular road unless they lived out this way or were up to something they didn’t want anyone else to see. Not that we
could
see all that much, what with all the dust the wheels had kicked up.

Maxine waved her hand in front of her face, as if that would do any good. She coughed, even though the reddish-brown cloud remained completely outside the cab.

“I only want the best for everyone,” I said, trying not to sound too pouty.

“You
only
want to rule the world, Odessa.”

“You’re the one wants that tiara so bad, Maxine.”

She raised her hands, fingers splayed like crystal-encrusted spikes on a glittering band. “I only want to embrace my inner princess.”

“And I only want…”

“To be
the
Queen Mama of Castlerock, Texas.”

Now how could I argue with
that?
“It beats being an eggbeater.”

“Maybe you should be an eggbeater, girl. Because you sure take the cake.” Maxine laughed at her own cornball joke.

And because she laughed, I laughed, too. When Maxine laughs, everyone around her has to follow. It’s infectious. But then, so are rashes and twenty-four-hour bugs and like both of those things, it can…it causes you to…it tends to…Oh, never mind about the analogy. I got to laughing with Max
ine, and went sailing right by the turn to go into the Alvarezes’ subdivision.

“About this cake…” I said, straining my eyes to see beyond the dust so I didn’t miss the next driveway or entrance to a cow pasture where I could pull in and turn us around.

“Yes?”

“Angel food or devil’s food?”

“Coconut!”

“Careful what you wish for,” I warned, already wondering could I get a store-bought version or would I have to make one myself.

“I could say the same to you, Miss Queen Mama Wannabe. Careful what you wish for for other people, as well.” Her voice went quiet, and she twisted in the seat so that her shoulders faced in my direction. “More careful still when you take it upon yourself to try to make those wishes come true. When you mix into people’s love lives…”

“I didn’t. I didn’t mix into anyone’s love life but Bernadette’s.”

“And Reverend Cordell’s.”

“And Reverend Cordell’s.”

“And, by default, Chloe and Sammy’s.”

“Chloe and Sammy? I refuse to call that a love life, Maxine. That boy mistreats her.”

“Okay, then, Jan and Morty.”

“Again, I did not set out to meddle there, and so far I haven’t really. Other than to send David over to talk to Morty and to try to be a friend to Jan and offer her support and advice.”

“Sticking your nose in other people’s marriages, even if you use your husband’s nose to do it, and lending unasked-
for advice even in the name of friendship. I don’t know what you call that in the part of Castlerock where you grew up, but where I was raised, we call that mixing in.”

“Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread, eh?”

“If there is one thing I know, Odessa, it is that you are no fool.” She reached over and took my hand and gave it a squeeze.

Warmth and love—if you can feel love in a touch, and I believe you can—flowed from my dear sister in Christ to me. It filled my heart, even the hollow part where doubt and fear had burrowed deep. When she let go, I still felt her raising me up. When she spoke again, I knew her words would do the same.

“And if there is one thing I
don’t
know, it’s…What
is
that man doing?”

Pop.
Talk about a way to burst a bubble of goodwill and joy between friends. Seeing a twenty-year-old van emblazoned with red-and-yellow flames on a mostly rust-colored—wait, make that mostly rusted-through-and-through—body broken down a few hundred yards ahead, with a man standing in the road waving his arms, will definitely do it.

I slowed the truck and inched in close to the steering wheel, squinting as hard as I dared without tempting the onset of deep eye wrinkles. “That’s not a
man,
Maxine. That’s Reverend Cordell.”

Maxine shot me a look.

“You know what I mean.” I veered to the right, taking my truck as far off the road as I could and still keep it out of the ditch.

I’d hardly wrestled the old gearshift into Park before Jake
had popped open the passenger door. “You two are as welcome as an answered prayer.”

He started to climb into the seat, which proved an interesting task, since Maxine had not yet relinquished it.

“Hold on a minute there, Reverend. What are you doing?” she asked, even as she scooted and scrambled in my direction along the bench seat.

“We’ve got to get moving,” he said without any explanation, as if we surely had been following his activities on some kind of minister-monitoring system and knew just where he wanted to get moving to and why.