The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (16 page)

“Because there he is.” Maxine dropped her hand and, with that movement, whether intentionally or not, brought my and the minister’s gazes downward so that we finally saw what had made her gasp.

“Helen Davenport!” There, in Morty’s still-mending arms, stood the woman who had sought to keep Bernadette from even meeting, much less finding romance with, Jake Cordell. “Morty Belmont is meeting secretly with Helen Davenport!”

Now who was playing at pretend? Anyone with eyes could see that this was more than just some covert get-together. They had not gone through all the machinations it would have taken for them to get here so they could swap recipes or work on a community service subcommittee. And though they were simply sitting in the grass at the base of the tree, they were close in each other’s arms and lost in each other’s eyes.

This was private.

This was intimate.

This was…heart wrenching.

“Should we tell Jan?” I whispered.

Maxine raised her head and, with a short, solemn nod, directed our attention through the tops of the trees, to a tiny shape on a rooftop. “I think she already knows.”

Some people believe there is a lesson in every event and circumstance. That every decision we make has the power to enlighten and every choice the power to change us, for the good or the not-so-good. And that if we try, we can learn something from both. I had to wonder what lesson this day had delivered.

To everything there is a season. A time for every purpose under heaven. Among them are:

A time to weep and a time to laugh.

A time to search and a time to give up.

A time to be silent and a time to speak.

I guess the thing I had to ask myself was, what time was it now? The time to stop pretending and speak the truth? Or the time to shut up and mind my own business?

N
oise or silence—whichever you choose, none of it matters if nobody will listen to you. You’ve heard the riddle, If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I don’t know. I can only say that, in my own experience, lost in the wilderness of being a nonretired wife married to a fully retired minister, when I speak, my husband seems to pick up only noise and responds mostly with silence. I have run out of ideas about how to get and hold his attention, and frankly, it worries me.

Was that what had gone awry between Jan and Morty? Had we all become so blind and deaf to each other that taking Chloe’s road, the piercings, the costumes, the car thievery, seemed the only way to avoid being as overlooked and undervalued as a…a…a Bernadette?

I’ve lived in the background of my own life for so long, and now these women that I had set out to help, that I have
come to care for, are making me reassess my choices, making me long to find my voice. If only there was somebody listening!

“Nancy Drew, David.” I had tried to keep it simple and use small words, not because I thought David needed small words, but because I thought they had a better chance of getting through. Compared with phrases like “surrendering my chairmanship of the community action council” and “dubious balloonist” and “ninja church ladies dropping from the trees,” it seemed like “car thief,” “creep,” and “cheater” had a better chance of standing out enough to draw his attention. “I said that Maxine and I felt like Nancy Drew. Not Scooby-Doo!”

“But if you’re involved with teenagers and chasing criminals away from an abandoned drive-in?” He rustled the paper in his hands and did not meet my eyes across the kitchen table. “That sounds straight out of Scooby-Doo to me.”

I put my elbows on the table. Yes, I know it’s bad manners, but I had cleared away the supper dishes already and the
thunk
my elbows made when they landed on the soft yellow checked tablecloth gave me a tiny bit of satisfaction. David didn’t even look over the top of the sports page at the sound.

I sighed. “I don’t know what bothers me more, that since your retirement you’ve come to learn the complexities, or lack thereof, of a cartoon mystery show, or that you haven’t really heard anything I said.”

“I’ve heard every word,” he replied. This was an old trick of his. It was not a lie. He
had
heard me, just like he heard the hum of the refrigerator motor a few feet away or the
clunk-ka-chunk
of the old air conditioner turning off and on. My voice had become nothing more than the whine of
an old appliance to him. And if I said that to him, he would lower his paper at last, lift up my hand, kiss my fingers, then remind me that he wouldn’t be able to survive in Texas without his fridge or his Freon-cooled air—or me.

The man knew how to work all the angles, and I loved him so much I let him get away with it.

“Anyway, Maxine and the Reverend Cordell and I did the chasing.” I picked up my iced tea glass and swirled the last slivers of ice around. “The teenagers—well, young adults, really—were nowhere to be found. The drive-in is not abandoned. It’s where they hold the flea market, and…”

He flipped a page lazily and coughed.

I plunked the glass back down on the table. “And why do I even bother?”

At last he lowered the paper and smiled at me. “What?”

“More tea?” I asked, reaching for the tall glass pitcher of sweet tea on the table between us.

He held his glass out, and I filled it almost to the top. I know my husband, and if he planned to pretend to hear my musings about the day’s events, he would need caffeine and sugar, and plenty of ’em.

“The drive-in is where they have the flea market, which reminds me!” All right, might as well get this out in the open now. It’s probably already obvious, but I have reached an age that when something important pops into my head I feel compelled to announce it on the spot, for fear of it slipping right back out of my brain again. It’s like I have a banana peel in my short-term-memory lobe or something, A thought hardly shows up before
swhoooosh,
it’s gone again. I can’t say how many times I’ve had something vital to say to someone and in the length of time it took to walk over
to them or dial their phone number I’ve completely forgotten it. So when talk turned to the flea market and I had David’s attention, I felt I needed to say, “Did I tell you about the problem with Helen Davenport’s credit card?”

“I hope you didn’t. Strikes me as a bit too close to spreading gossip, my dear.” Said it sort of superior and snottylike, I thought. Not in an “I’m a better Christian than you” way, but with that ever-irritating “men don’t do this stuff, and if women were half the men that men are, they wouldn’t, either” sort of attitude. Patronizing. In fact, I think that’s the actual definition of patronizing. That almost haughty tone. The hint of boredom or detachment in the expression. The very man-ness of it all.

“Well, that’s where you are wrong.” I smiled. After over thirty years of marriage to this thoughtful and compassionate human being who chooses his words carefully and tries to always act in faith and do the right thing, it just tickled me pink to be able to tell him he was wrong about something. Oh, I know, it’s a fault, but as faults go, I think it’s one a lot of wives share. “It’s not gossip. It’s part of my work for my action council.”

“I thought you planned to resign from that.”

Well, what do you know? He had been listening—a little. “No, I said I intended to resign and give all the information over to Gloria Alvarez, but then all this came up and I didn’t. And now I sort of think that I won’t.”

He took a long sip of tea before asking, “Why not?”

“Because it would be irresponsible. I know I started all this for questionable reasons, but the fact is, I did start it, and there are real problems on the property, and somebody has to…” I finally paused to catch my breath and caught my
husband smiling down into his tea glass. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice you trying to change the subject like that?”

He chuckled.

“But it isn’t changing the subject, really because all of this is tied in together, which is why I can’t walk away from chairing that action council.”

“All right. Go on with your story.” He gulped down some tea and shuffled through the remainder of the paper spread out before him.

“The thing about the credit card…It was declined, even though the cardholder said it should have gone through just fine.” I was careful not to mention Helen by name, even though that was a part of the whole story and I’d have to bring it up eventually. But given the man on the other side of this pretty much one-sided conversation, he’d probably have stopped listening by then. “That made me and Maxine wonder if maybe something was amiss at the flea market. You know, had a vendor overcharged the account or something like that, but not so much anymore because you will never guess who that credit card belonged to.”

“Helen Davenport.”

“Helen Daven…Oh.” It took me back a bit to realize that I actually
had
mentioned Helen’s name,
and
he had heard me,
and
he had put a little thought into the particulars of the story.

He chuckled, but only slightly, because, you know, men don’t take pleasure in anything that even borders on gossip.

“Yes, well, anyway,” I continued, “now we know Helen has conducted this whole secret life on the flea market grounds—which is clearly why Jan wants the place closed forever. At this point, neither Maxine nor I think she knows
who the ‘other woman’ is, but she knows where they meet and so she wants it all torn down to both take away their trysting spot and to remove it from her line of vision. Of course, it isn’t actually
in
her line of vision unless she crawls out on the roof outside her spare bedroom. But neither she nor Morty can seem to resist doing that, so…” I gulped down a breath at last. Between the twin tendencies of David’s attention to drift off and my own mind to wander, I had to get it all out as quickly and concisely as I could. “So suddenly it all fits.”

“This is where your feeling like Nancy Drew comes in, right?”

It raised my spirits to know, once again, that he had heard
something
I said.

“Actually, we felt like our favorite girl detective before this, but now that you mention it, this realization did make us feel awfully clever, too.”

He gave me a wink. “I can’t imagine one minute of the day when either you or Maxine doesn’t feel like the cleverest gal in the room.”

After all these years, the man still made me feel all mushy and melty and… “What if we are
both
in the same room? We can’t
both
feel like the cleverest one.”

“Hmm. Good point. Let me mull that over and get back to you.” He started to push his chair back.

“You stay right there, bucko.”

“Bucko?” His silvery eyebrows shot up. I guess I should have taken a moment to describe my husband long before now, but I did say he was a retired minister, and I think most people who have met retired ministers already have an idea of what they look like. David fits that idea pretty well.
Ruddy complexion. Round in face and belly, but not obese. Hair gone gray, what there is of it. Last time he went to have his driver’s license renewed, under the spot where it said hair color, he wrote the word
pink,
explaining that all they could see in the photo would be his sun-kissed shiny bald head. Oh, and his eyebrows, which have gotten a bit bushy with age and which shot up and stayed up when he asked, “Did you just call me ‘bucko’?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? The Reverend Cordell thinks I’m part cowgirl now.”

“Cowgirl? Girl detective? Ninja church lady? Odessa, honey, I hardly know you anymore.” And he wasn’t all smiles and chuckles and winks when he said that, either.

“Ha! Well, I know
you,
David Pepperdine, and you are not getting out of hearing the whole of my story quite so easily.” I waggled my finger at him. “The point I wanted to make was that Maxine read an article.”

“Well, that settles it, then.
She’s
the clever one.”

“Oh, stop it.” I nudged his knee with my toe. “She read an article that said that sometimes when people sneak around they build whole elaborate secret lives in order to cover their tracks. New bank accounts. Post office boxes to get bills, and credit cards exclusively for their rendezvous.”

“And I thought people giving credit cards to kids was bad. But a credit card exclusively for your rendezvous…”

“David! I am trying to tell you that Maxine and I now wonder if maybe Morty had something to do with running her card up to the limit. I mean, Jan said they were having financial difficulties. How else could the man afford a mistress?”

“A mistress? Odessa, now you are the one who needs to
stop it. That is far too loaded a term to throw around when you don’t know all the facts.”

“I know what I saw. They were sitting in the grass, in each other’s arms, gazing into one another’s eyes.”

“If that were all it took to be a mistress, then…then…Odessa, I am just not comfortable with all this.”

“All what?”

“The speculation. The spying on people. The speed with which you reach conclusions…”

“None of that was intended to be unchristian, David. In fact, it was just the opposite. I was trying to be an instrument of the Lord.” I sat back and searched my heart for any signs of malicious glee at the misfortunes of the people I had been talking about. None was there. In fact, the whole thing made me ache through and through, and had been the subject of many prayers since we had happened upon the inappropriate couple. “But in all this, my deepest thoughts and sympathies lie with Jan. I know what it’s like to be a wife who raised her children and then wonders what use she is to anyone, most of all her husband, anymore. To have doubts and fears.”

“I would never stray, Odessa. I never have.”

“I believe you, David. But don’t you think at some point in their marriage Morty said the exact same thing to Jan?”

A troubled look passed over his face. “Odessa, I…”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, sweetie. I’m just saying that there is a lot of temptation out there, even at our ages. A lot of widows and divorcées just like Helen…”

“So you blame Helen for this?”

“No…I…Well, we all have to accept responsibility for our actions. But what I meant by that was that Maxine thinks Helen is divorced.”

“Hmm.”

“Myself, I thought she was widowed.” And off my brain went, sliding along down a new thoughtway. “We wanted to ask Jake, but he made it clear that he had no intention of discussing anything about what we saw, because Helen is a member of his congregation.”

“Good for him.”

“Yeah, I know.” I refilled my tea glass. “But pardon me for being a little bit disappointed.”

David gave an indulgent smile that acknowledged my all-too-human feelings. “If a flock can’t trust their own shepherd to guard their privacy, who can they trust?”

“Of course. You’re right. I told him it was exactly what you would do.” I drew the cold pitcher to my chest and slumped back in my chair. “It’s what you
are
doing right now, isn’t it?”

“Right now?” He frowned, a bit too dourly. “Right now, I’m reading the paper. Or I would be, if I could just be left to concentrate on it.”

“No, what you are doing now is acting evasive and changing the subject and teasing me to distract me from giving in to gossip and becoming a victim of my own poor guesswork.”

“Hmm,
I
must be the clever one in the room, then.”

“Not if I figured out your plan.” I set the pitcher aside and flexed my suddenly icy fingers. “I should have thought of it. You served as pastor to Morty for so many years. You went to see him recently. You knew about this.”

“If I did or if I didn’t, it’s not fodder for after-dinner conversation.”

I sat up straight, opened my mouth, then shut it again. Elbow on the table again, I rested my cheek in my hand.