The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (2 page)

T
he Book of Proverbs tells us—more than once, so you know not to take it lightly—that it is better to live on the corner of a roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome wife.

Jan Bishop Belmont was not what I’d call particularly quarrelsome. No, if pressed to find a word for the forty-something blonde with the sprayed-on suntan—Castlerock is a small town, so if you don’t want folks to know how you got that golden glow, go out of town to get it—I’d pick…hmm…
malcontent
.

Mal
from the French for “ill” and
content
as in all the stuff contained inside something. Or someone. That’s right, inside of all that prim and proper exterior, Jan carried around something that ailed her. For the longest time, I didn’t know what, and so all I could do was try to get others to be more tender toward her—and try my best to stay out of her way.

“Hot-air balloon rides! Tethered for your complete safety.” Every Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, a gangly young man stood outside the old drive-in movie theater parking lot that served as the grounds for the flea market. Hour after hour, he shouted to passersby and handed out flyers for a ruddy-faced fellow who spent his time taking anyone with the price of a ticket twenty feet up above the crowd in a basket attached to a colorful two-story silk balloon.

At least I think it was silk, but honestly I didn’t get close enough to know for sure at that point. Maybe it was that parachute material—though that would hardly inspire confidence, would it? Making something you want to fly through the air out of the same stuff you use to help you
fall
from the sky? Hmm. Either way, I guess it all boiled down to a matter of trust, trusting silk or synthetic. Trusting a ruddy-faced man with a woven basket. And trusting the Lord, of course, to keep a body afloat. Or is that a
flight?

Whatever the word was, I did not, at that time, possess the amount of trust in anything but the Lord to give it a try. Me? In a hot-air balloon? Outwardly, I may seem just the type, but below this, uh,
colorful
exterior beats the heart of a woman who has lived most of her life in someone else’s shadow. And been just fine with that. Mostly fine with it.

Well, I lived with it, anyway.

However, my trust in the Lord has
always
been mighty, so from the very first time I saw that breathtakingly buoyant conveyance, I couldn’t rule out the prospect entirely. Which is probably why it was
this
Friday morning, just moments before the man who ran the flea market was about
to fling open the gate to let the treasure hunt for bargains commence, that that young fellow rushed up to me and Maxine.

“Hot-air balloon rides! Tethered for your complete safety.” The paper rattled in his hand. The wind picked up his shaggy brown hair and pressed it against his pale and slightly blemished skin. He hunched his narrow shoulders and grinned right at me. “All major credit cards accepted.”

“No, don’t waste good paper on a bad prospect, young man.” Maxine pushed back his hand, and the bright yellow flyer he had in it. “Choose your battles, the Reverend Nash would tell you. It would take an army to get me up in one of those contraptions.”

I stopped, because I always stopped to fuss over young men who think they can charm me into doing the improbable. I’m a sucker for charm in all its forms, and I could tell that this young man, despite looking like he had gotten dressed from someone else’s dirty-clothes hamper this morning, fairly brimmed over with the stuff. I shook my head at him, smiling. “In what wild flight of imagination can you actually picture us two granny-ladies, loaded down with all manner of vintage jewelry and sporting fanny packs over floral jersey sundresses, hoisting ourselves up into a big ol’basket? Let alone allowing you to launch us heavenward under a canopy of…whatever fabric that is up there sporting an advertisement for the King of Beers?”

“Aw, that logo isn’t permanent. The boss switches it every few weeks,” he said, as if that might just change our minds about the prospect.

It didn’t.

“I don’t care if you tack on a banner lauding the King
of Kings—and you wouldn’t do so bad to think about that, because wherever the Lord goes, He draws a crowd.” Maxine paused for a minute so he could let that sink in, then scowled. “But no matter what you advertise, it won’t help draw me into that contraption.”

“Me, either,” I told the young man, sounding a little less decisive than my friend. “Not at this point in my life.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Ms. Pepperdine.” He looked right at me and said my name. I’m not sure how he knew my name, but then, loads of people that I had never actually been formally introduced to knew me through the church and my many local activities. Still, it always surprises me when somebody uses my name and I don’t know them. I took a step back.

“Don’t write off the balloon ride just because you’re a grandma.” He took a step toward me. Guess he had sized up Maxine as a lost cause already, but clearly he had high hopes for me. “There’s still a lot of fire in you.”

“Still?” From ripe to rotten, in a single word.
Still?
That’s the kind of word folks tacked on at the flea market when they wanted to convince someone to pay too much for an object that had long since lost its usefulness.
Still
hinted that I might have some doubt myself as to the depths of the well of my vitality.
Still,
indeed. “Did you just say I
still
have a lot of fire in me, son?”

“Oh, you’ve done it now,” Maxine said. And she laughed a bit as she said it, too.

“Yeah, still. Is there…something wrong with that?” He cocked his head, his expression bright with an innocence that could not conceal the glint of mischief in his smiling eyes.

“Well, just you listen to that same sentence without the word
still
and see what you think.” I would have pushed up my sleeves, had I been wearing any, and maybe flicked my wrist and done a little flourish, the way a magician does right before he pulls that rabbit out of his hat. “‘There’s still a lot of fire in you, Ms. Pepperdine.’”

He nodded to show he’d tried it on for size and found it fitting.

“Or…” This time I did waggle my hands about a bit, and narrowed one eye, trying to look mysterious, sultry and clever, or at the very least impish. I wet my lips and affected a low, playful tone. “Ms. Pepperdine, you have a
lot of fire
in you.”

His eyes got big for a moment, then his smile grew wide. He bobbed his head. “I get it.”

“I thought you might.”

He nodded again, only this time he shot me a look, all coy and crafty and just darling in its ill-disguised artlessness. He winked and added, without so much as a snicker, “When I say you have got a lot of fire in you, that means you’ve never stopped being a hot babe.”

Charm. Gets me every time.

“You’re my witness, Maxine. That adorable young man called me a hot babe.” I licked the tip of my thumb, pressed it to my shoulder and hissed like bacon sizzling in a hot skillet.

“More like a hot-
flash
babe.” She licked her own thumb, stuck it to my shoulder and made a
pffftt
sound—more fizzle than sizzle.

We both laughed.

My young salesman did not. Wise kid for his age. “I bet
if you ever tried going up in the balloon you’d love it, Ms. Pepperdine. You too, Ms. Nash.”

“That’s Cooke-Nash, son,” I put in real quick. Wise and educated are not the same thing, but I knew he’d never make that mistake again. “Maxine is one of the original liberated women who kept her maiden name and hyphenated it with that of her darling husband, the good Reverend.”

“Cool.” He gave her an appreciative nod, even though both Maxine and I knew once-controversial issues like women keeping their names didn’t even register in his realm of reality.

“Honey, you are wasting your breath talking to me, no matter what name you use to do it.” Maxine waved her hand and her impressive collection of 1930s polka-dot Bakelite bracelets clattered down her forearm. “There’s not enough hot air in all of Texas…”

“A state famous as one of the world’s leading producers of hot air,” I hurried to add.

“…to get me up in one of those things.” She looked at the fellow over the top of her pink-opalescent reading glasses—you know, the kind you get at a nice lady’s boutique, not the kind you pick up at some discount place with
mart
in the name.
Très
cute, I tell you.

I’m not the only still-hot babe in this duo, after all. And us hot babes, even when we have to have help to read the fine print or see the marks on the underside of ceramic poodle statues, we want to do it in style.

So after Maxine gave him that look, she put her hand on her, um,
ample
hip. She looked toward the rainbow-striped balloon billowing along the ground in front of the old towering concrete screen with the words Satellite Vista
Drive-In Theatre painted on it. She tsked and shook her head. “Not enough hot air in all of Texas.”

He took it well. It’s hard not to take things well from Maxine, even rejection. She has that kind of face, dimpled and motherly. Her skin is dark, of course, but not so dark that you can’t see the smattering of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

Now I ask you, how can you get your feelings hurt by someone with freckles on her nose? And a sweet, soft voice that meanders out of an ever-present smile in a slow Texas drawl?

So he took
her
refusal in good spirits.

Now, me…? Well, at this point in my life, I guess I looked an easy mark. I certainly must have looked one to that hairdresser who put a wild white streak in the front of my usually dignified silver hair. Tarnished silver. Okay, silver plate, worn thin and discolored. Which is why I got myself to the chichi-est salon in all of Castlerock for a new color and do and how I ended up platinum-blond with what the staff there called “chunky highlights” of almost pure white. If my husband, David, hadn’t liked it so much, I’d have headed for the drugstore posthaste for a bottle of hair rinse and a floppy sun hat.

Anyway, either my hair or my demeanor or something else about me screamed
easy mark
to the balloon-ballyhooing charmer, or that young man knew something about me that even I didn’t know.

“I can tell, Ms. Pepperdine,
you
want to cut loose.”

“I do?”

“Now that’s a scary thought.” Maxine turned her over-the-glasses glare on me.

“
You’re
just itchin’ to have an adventure.” He pushed the piece of paper in his hand toward me.

“Me?” The page crackled in my hand. “Itching?”

“It’s all the peroxide they used in her hair. Gave her a rash,” Maxine teased.

The kid ignored her, which was exactly the proper thing to do after a remark like that. Then he fixed his winning smile on me—also not a bad choice. “You, Ms. Pepperdine, want to break free from the things that tie you down here. You want to rise up.”

“Up?”

“Yes, up.”

My eyes followed the line of his hand high into the air over my head.

“Up above this crowd.” He waved his fliers over my head.

“Me? Above
this
crowd?” I could almost feel my feet lifting. My heart beat a little faster. I gazed skyward and swallowed hard. I could just about…

“Get a life.”

A woman’s voice broke through my thoughts and brought me rocketing hard back down to earth.

“You’d think they were giving away gold in there, the way y’all flock around the gate here,” she said, a little too loud to be mistaken for talking to herself and yet not aiming her criticism at anyone in particular. “It’s nothing short of a fire hazard. I can’t believe anyone would be in such an all-fired hurry to be the first one to have a chance to buy somebody else’s tacky trash. Is that the best thing you can think to do with your time?”

I sighed and gave the young man a gentle pat on the back. “Son, I think you’ve read me all wrong. I’m a lady. And a
minister’s wife for more than half my life. It’s just not in me to ever, ever,
ever
put myself above anybody.”

“It’s just a few feet.” He pointed again.

I didn’t look. The unseen complaining woman was right. I had better things to do with my time
and
my money than to waste it on such a personal indulgence. “No, but I do thank you for thinking I might actually try it.”

“If it’s the money you’re worried about, we do take all major credit cards,” he called, and it seemed to me his voice carried a bit too much urgency.

“Oh, I would never bring a credit card out here, sugar,” I said as I hustled along after Maxine, giving him a wave over my shoulder. My collection of bracelets—charm, of course—jangled like dozens of tiny dented bells. “Maybe you should look for someone who wasn’t raised right and doesn’t mind looking down on his or her fellow man now and again.”

But the young man had vanished. Just like that. Disappeared into the crowd without a backward glance. “After all that time invested in getting me to just think about that ride, he sure did write me off awfully fast when I said I didn’t have a credit card.”

“Maybe you look like you don’t carry enough cash on you to pay for the thing outright so he gave up,” Maxine suggested.

“Hmm.” Something about it all didn’t ring true—except the not-carrying-too-much-cash part. I keep to my budget. A lifetime of good stewardship, prodded along by the ever-watchful eyes of certain members of David’s—that’s my husband David Samuel Pepperdine—of David’s congregation saw to that. Trust me, I learned early that if I indulged in some extravagance, even something as small as a hat that I shouldn’t have worn to church service, David would hear about it.

Maxine and I hadn’t walked on far enough to get gravel dust on our favorite flea market footwear—nurses’ shoes, if you must know; think about it, it makes perfect sense, being on our feet all day out here and all—when that precious young man took my advice about moving on to someone who didn’t mind looking down on others.