The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

by Annie Jones

  All of us tensed right along with her, the way you do when you know something awful just might happen and you don’t have the slightest clue how you should react. Of all the things we should get better at with age that—knowing how not to let people fluster the stuffing out of you—should be one of them.

  And apparently, for some people, it is.

  “If the man falls, he falls.” Galina Roja waved one gnarled hand in the air and marched right on down the stairs. When she reached the last step, she turned and rolled her shoulders in a utterly nonchalant shrug. “We should be able to see him when he hits the ground outside the kitchen.”

  Chloe gasped.

  Gloria groaned.

  I opened my mouth to say something, though I cannot tell you what because my mind had gone completely blank.

  And then Maxine saved the day by doing the only thing a person really could do in a situation like that. She laughed. Then she put her arm around Jan’s shoulders. “Come on, sweetie. We’ll make coffee and we’ll talk.”

  “Not about this, we won’t.” Jan moved out from under Maxine’s warm embrace. I know it was a warm embrace because I know Maxine and I know that in that moment she had done her best to envelop Jan in the special bond of friendship that forms between women and in Christian love.

  And Jan had rejected it.

  Not out of anger at Maxine or any of us, but because she wasn’t ready. Maybe because there was so much more going on than she felt she could trust us with, or maybe because she thought if she ignored the truth of what had happened here, it would all go back to the way it was before. And even though the way it was before was just awful, it was familiar. Safe, in some sad and desperate way.

  “Then we’ll talk about the complaints about the flea market.” I hadn’t lost my mind or my sense of purpose about Jan. This was just a tactic. We couldn’t very well show the woman how much we cared for and supported her if we all found reasons to hightail it out of her presence whenever things got ugly. This was Jan Belmont, after all. You couldn’t avoid things getting ugly around that woman. Which is kind of ironic, given her gorgeous face, good figure, excellent taste in clothes and beautifully-appointed home.

  Anyway, all that leads me to believe that loveliness is a natural state for her, and that given the chance and exposure to the gentle ministrations of me and Maxine, Jan would set aside her tendency toward ugliness altogether.

  “Perfect.” Jan’s heels clacked over the glazed ceramic tiles in her large, updated kitchen. “Going over those complaints suits me just fine. The faster we deal with them the faster we can shut that horrid rat’s nest of a place down forever.”

  Okay, so maybe Jan was a little more attached to ugly than I’d suspected.

  “Not everyone wants to close the flea market down, though, Jan.” Gloria helped her mother-in-law into a chair at the table. “Some people would, in fact, like to see it improved and helped to play a larger role in our community.”

  “Well, if any of those people are here right now…?” Jan whizzed by without making eye contact with any of us. She flung open the cabinet above the coffeemaker and pulled out a blue canister. She plunked it on the table, yanked open a drawer, then started rummaging through the silverware. “They can just get out of my house. I became a part of this committee to close that eyesore down.”

  Gloria sank into a chair.

  Chloe did the same.

  Maxine and I stood. Ephesians 6:13-14 tells us to put on the full armor of God and stand. So we stood. We did not run, even though flouncing out just then would have proved both righteously rewarding and big-time dramatic—two things I cannot usually resist. Not to mention something of a relief to be off the case once and for all, and not because of my own fear or frustration, but because of Jan’s own ultimatum.

  But I had promised to give my all to this plan, and I couldn’t turn away from it. “Jan, honey. Maybe we should—”

  “Compromise? Oh, no! I have had all the compromise I can stomach, thank you.” Jan turned around with a spoon gripped in her hand, her expression positively grim. “I won’t settle for anything less than what I want, than what is best and right. And the sooner we do that, the sooner life around here will return to the way it should be.”

  Maybe there’s a reason you don’t think too much about the person not on the ledge, and keep your eyes fixed on the one who’s likely to jump. Because you realize that sometimes the only thing you can do in a case like this is get yourself down on the ground, hold out a net and pray. Some problems can only be dealt with like that—through faith and preparedness and damage control.

  And if you don’t know exactly what put that ledge stander there in the first place, your trying to reach out to them or to tamper with the ones they have gone out to leave behind just might be the thing that pushes them over the edge once and for all.

  Chapter Eleven

  Matchmaker. Hopeless romantic. Fix-up artist. Yenta. Cupid wannabe. Mom.

  Every culture and historical time period has had those people—okay, women, mostly—who feel it is their duty to do whatever they can to smooth out that rocky road to love for the tenderfoots and gentle hearts and the, to my way of thinking, sometimes softheaded—or should that be hard- headed?—people who don’t seem to be able to do it for themselves. “It” being to find someone to share a few hours or a few evenings or a few rest-of-their-lives with. (So I believe in love and taking vows and oh, let’s call it laying the foundation of the family unit as the means to happiness and stability. I’m a minister’s wife. Did you really expect otherwise?)

  Anywho…we had just seen very real and painful evidence that the road to romance, to love and marriage—which are supposed to go together like a horse and carriage—may start out smooth, but doesn’t always stay that way That sometimes the horse kicks up or gets stuck in a rut, and all too often the shock absorbers on that carriage take a beating. I have to say my own trip on love’s long and winding highway has taken an unexpected curve or two and hit some bumps along the way. But never once has it occurred to me, or to David, if I can be so bold as to speak for him, to jump out of the carriage and proclaim, “It’s just not worth it.”

  It is worth it to me. The good stuff, love and warmth and companionship and laughter and having someone to depend on, that’s all worth the risk. And the bad stuff? I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, but then again, I wouldn’t trade what I got from it, what David and I both got from going through it, for a million miles of smooth road stretched out before me to travel on alone.

  In the days following that afternoon at the Belmonts’, Gallina Roja and Gloria Alvarez no longer seemed as convinced about the whole married verses single life issue for Bernadette as they once were. Or maybe they were spending extra time pampering their baby/hubby, out of appreciation that he had loved them well and provided for them financially and emotionally and not strayed from that path and left their family unit stranded in a broken buggy. Either way, the pair of them backed off from reminding Bernadette that she needed a man and gave the poor girl some breathing space.

  To which I could only say, “Hooray!”

  Because it gave me more room to do my work.

  “I suppose you know the burning question on our minds, Reverend Cordell.”

  “Our minds, Odessa?”

  “My mind, then.” I gave Maxine a look—the kind I had perfected on my kids when they were young and got squirmy in church—then went on unfolding folding chairs in the fellowship hall of Bernadette and Jake’s church.

  I liked the sound of that. Didn’t you? Bernadette and Jake’s church?

  Anyway, two days had passed since our last…whatever that mess was when we had all gotten together. I had called yet another meeting of my action council—the whole deal, not just my subcommittee—to address the flea market concerns. Honest! This time I had actually sorted through the complaint letters and written up an agenda, and I intended for us to now come up with a plan of action for Gloria Alvarez to present to the town c
ouncil.

  It just seemed the right thing to do, both because I was this new Odessa who did new things and had her own funny little wayward-ish flock and because…well, because things had not gone so well in the other areas of my plan…my plan to submit to God’s plan. I needed to see some progress somewhere, with someone, to convince myself I hadn’t just cooked up a crazy scheme out of boredom and good intentions. I needed to taste a little success. I needed…lunch.

  All right, I had an agenda beyond the one I had typed up at home the night before. I had plotted and schemed, just a little, to find a way for Bernadette to show off her cooking skills by providing lunch for us all. Does it detract from my good intentions at all that I had done so knowing that Mrs. Alvarez had to leave the meeting early, and take her mother-in-law with her, as Gloria was the keynote speaker at a Realtors’ luncheon? Or that our new artist friend Abner had promised to give Chloe another shot at her job?

  “Shot? At her job? You say that about the girl who does body piercing and tattooing? Odessa, I just have to interject here and say you have got to stop with the bad puns before someone takes a shot at you.”

  “I am attempting to lighten things up, Maxine. After all that upsetting stuff with Chloe and Sammy and Jan and Morty, I thought we should focus on…on…”

  “On a couple of people too nice to tell you to mind your own business?”

  “I don’t have a business, Maxine.”

  “That’s why you have so much time to get into everybody else’s.”

  “Noted.” And I didn’t say that just to get her to shut up, either. It was something worth thinking about.

  Clink.

  But as I was saying before Maxine dropped her two cents in, was it wrong that I pulled together this lunch meeting, when I knew Chloe wouldn’t be able to attend at all? Or that Jan had respectfully…

  “And by respectfully Odessa means that she didn’t use any actual profanity when she pitched a hissy fit over the phone and told us that until we showed some real interest in closing that nasty eyesore down for good, she wouldn’t be attending any more meetings.”

  …declined my invitation? Or that I had every confidence that at just the suggestion that we leave the young people to their own devices and head to my house to kick off our shoes and whip up some BLTs, Maxine would race out of the church and into my truck faster than a hog squeezing through a greased fence?

  Not to compare Maxine to a hog, you know, it’s just my way of saying that I know that if going barefoot and eating sandwiches were part of the deal, my friend would drop any pretense of a protest real quick and go along with me.

  And with us out of the way, that would leave the Reverend and Bernadette all alone to enjoy a nice meal and even nicer company.

  That’s not a deception, is it? I don’t think of myself as having a deceptive bone in my body. My hair, well, there is a wee bit of deception in that, if you take into account the dye and the back combing. But in the part of me that matters? I am one hundred percent against deception. And one hundred percent in favor of love, and giving it a little boost whenever I can.

  So here the three of us were, waiting for our quorum of members to arrive, getting the place ready and, well…there was this question, this burning question that I was just aching to ask.

  “Oh, Maxine, let’s not play games.” I said as I clunked the last metal chair down on the floor and shoved it under the long, rectangular table. “It’s hanging in the air between the three of us like that proverbial elephant.”

  “There’s an elephant hanging in the air in here?” Maxine, who had been busying herself getting out flatware, held a slotted spoon up for inspection. She spoke to me with one eye peering through the opening, as if it was Sherlock Holmes’s magnifying glass itself. “Where?”

  I took up the white tablecloth I’d found in the cabinet and unfurled it with a crisp snap. “Proverbial, Maxine. I said proverbial.”

  “I don’t see an elephant in here, and I certainly don’t recall one in Proverbs, do you, Reverend?”

  To his credit, Jake Cordell laughed at our antics. I had put him in an awkward situation to say the least, and he had rolled with it. Good for him. The more time I spent around the man, the more I liked him. And the more I wanted to know…

  “So tell me, Reverend, why aren’t you married?”

  He did not wince. He did not blush. He did not stutter or stumble or mumble or do a comical spit take with the coffee in the paper cup with the trendy café’s label that he’d brought in a few minutes earlier.

  Maxine didn’t, either, but then I suspect she had known exactly what was coming. She just went on about her work, humming as if she didn’t care how the conversation went, keeping one ear cocked to hear every last word.

  Jake did clear his throat. Then he turned to me, smiled warmly and said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Pepperdine.”

  “Congratulations?” I asked.

  Maxine huffed or…something I don’t know the exact word for the sound she made but it let us know that the man had gotten her attention and she was impressed with his tact.

  As for myself, I wasn’t exactly on board with it. “Congratulations for what?”

  “For being the first, and perhaps the only, minister’s wife, retired or otherwise—in fact, probably the only good Christian woman I have met since my ordination—who did not ask me that question within forty-eight hours of having made my acquaintance.”

  I didn’t know whether to beam with pride or hang my head in shame at that distinction. So I chose something altogether different—I became skeptical. “What about Maxine?”

  My friend waved the question off, using her spoon with all the regal dignity of a Queenly scepter. “Oh, I asked him the first day I met him.”

  And you didn’t tell me? I didn’t say that so much as show it, by dropping my jaw and plunking my fist on my hip. After giving the pose a moment to sink in, and maybe hit Maxine’s guilt center, I gave my head a waggle and asked, “And what did he say?”

  “Ask him.” Again she waved the spoon in the air. “He can speak for himself.”

  He met my gaze with his arms folded and his feet—still in those shabby shoes—anchored shoulder-width apart. “I said…”

  “You can’t teach an old dog to change its spots. It’s all I’m saying.” Gallina Roja’s craggy voice carried into the fellowship hall a full ten seconds before her small body came scurrying into view.

  “Are you calling my daughter an old dog?” Gloria Alvarez had ignored the mixed metaphor coming from her mother-in-law’s mouth and gone straight to the heart of matters. “Your own granddaughter? An old dog?”

  “She is not clever like a fox. You got to give me that, Gloria.”

  I pressed my finger to my lips, intending to hush their less-than-flattering bickering over Bernadette with my less-than-attractive bug-eyed not-in-front-of-the-potential-life-mate expression.

  Which did not faze the elder Mrs. Alvarez in the least as she strutted along, gesturing and talking loud and slow, as if she had forgotten to turn up her hearing aid this morning. “Not when she did what she just did.”

  Bug-eyed exasperation turned to bug-eyed apprehension at that single sentence. I no longer had the luxury of quieting things down. If I wanted my plan to stay on track, I needed details—and I needed them now.

  I caught the older of the two women by the arm and demanded, “What did she, uh, do?”

  The grandmotherly old chin quivered. Her dark eyes shimmered. The deep wrinkles around her mouth gave her an even more dour and hopeless countenance as she said, with the kind of high drama worthy of the highest and mightiest of Texas belles, “She told.”

  Okay, I had no idea what that meant, but still, it chilled me to the marrow. I stepped back and moved my gaze from the lined and weathered features before me to Gloria’s glamorous and fully made-up face. “Told?”

  “Everyone…in…the…church,” Gloria whispered.

  By this time, Maxine and Jake had taken note of the
three of us huddled with our heads together. I could tell this because they formed their own sort of tête-à-tête and started whispering themselves. Of course, I knew Maxine was doing that out of pure mischief. The fact that Jake had become her cohort in it so quickly could only mean…

  Well, it could only mean that he was every bit as charming as anyone might hope for in a minister who hadn’t yet got snapped up by…

  “Oh!” It came upon me like…not like a lightning bolt, but like something lesser and yet just as out-of-the-blue and full of crackle and pop and maybe even a spark.

  That’s it. A spark. It hit me like one of those arcing sparks from an old mad-scientist movie. And all at once, I got the full effect of what Bernadette had gone and done, and why her match-minded elders were none too happy. “She told everyone in the church that we were meeting here today.”

  Gloria slapped her hands against her skirt in resigned exasperation. “And that she was supposed to bring lunch for the new minister.”

  “She couldn’t have left that part out,” I muttered. The meeting, most church members would have gladly missed. But a meal?

  Gloria nodded. “We are facing a full-on church-lady throw-down potluck, with every unmarried girl around as a side dish.”

  “You’d better get out more chairs and flatwares, Mrs. Odessa.” Gallina Roja shook her head, and when that action put the Reverend in her line of vision, she stopped cold and smiled. “It’s just like her, you know. Never thinking of herself. That’s a nice trait in a girl, don’t you think, Reverend?”

  “I agree, it’s a virtue, Señora Alvarez, to have a servant’s heart.” He smiled, but it wasn’t that wonderful smile that had won me over the first time I saw it. This smile held something back.

  It’s a virtue to have a servant’s heart. But…

  He didn’t actually say it—and I suspect the old gal wouldn’t have heard it, even if she had been wearing her hearing aid and had it cranked up to the max. But the feeling of what he hadn’t said lingered. It hung in the air, right alongside my proverbial elephant. He could admire Bernadette for her servant’s heart, but…