The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (10 page)

“You see, Mr.…Abner—” Maxine smiled that sassy freckle-nosed smile of hers and raised her chin like a true woman of regal bearing “—we
are
members of a very special order.”

He quirked one eyebrow higher than the other, which gave him less of a catlike quality and, coupled with his crooked smile, made him look like a lop-eared pup. “Oh?”

“The sisterhood of the Queen Mamas.” I gave a flourish with one hand.

He shook his head, his crooked lips almost forming an actual smile at last. “You got ID?”

“Do we look like we need ID?” Maxine put her shoulders back and her chin down.

“Just think of us as members of the God squad. We’re here trying to help Chloe.”

“God squad, huh?” He looked out toward the front of the place. The sunlight from the front window lit his face. It was a good face. Well traveled, but brightened from within by kindness and a sort of wisdom I suppose folks like Maxine and me will never acquire. “Just so happens I’m a member of that team myself.”

“Who’d a thunk it,” Maxine muttered, and in her eyes I could see that she had, indeed,
thunk
it and she believed his words even before he spoke them

“Yeah.” He moved his head slightly, and both Maxine and I followed his apparent line of vision to a section of the wall that displayed Celtic crosses and references to Bible verses.

Maxine and I looked at each other.

Finally, I stepped right up to Abner and spoke. I knew I had nothing to fear from him, and anyway, if I had really committed to allow God to use me I had to go places I would not normally go and trust people I might not normally have been open to trusting. “I think Chloe is in trouble, and we want to help.”

“Trouble?” His narrowed his eyes. “Something to do with Sammy?”

“Yes, Sammy certainly seems at the heart of it, to my way of thinking,” I said.

Abner squinted even more until I could not even see the color of his pupils anymore. “That Sammy, you want to like the guy. You want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But don’t let yourself, ma’am. That Sammy is no good.”

“Here now, if you’re on our team, you know none of us are as good as we should be,” Maxine reminded him. “That’s why we need a shepherd to help bring us home.”

Abner blinked, and that odd angle of his lips returned. “Did you say you were a lady minister?”

“Ministers’ wives,” she said.

“Both of us,” I chimed in.

“Formidable.” He nodded. “I think you can handle this, then. Sammy is the reason I fired Chloe. I didn’t want to
do it. Kept giving her another chance, and another, until finally…”

My shoulders slumped at the thought of what her relationship with Sammy had cost Chloe. “Poor kid.”

“She got distracted.” Abner glanced over at a workstation that had none of the kinds of photos and personal items of the other workstations. “Whatever is going on with Sammy distracted her. Got her mind off her work.”

“As a tattoo artist?” I, too, looked at the seemingly abandoned workstation.

“She was apprenticing.”

“Oh,” I said, as if I had a clue what that entailed.

“Mostly she did body piercings.” He fingered his earring. “She was really good with those.”

“Takes one to pierce one, I guess.” I laughed at my own lame joke.

He shrugged. “But recently, the more involved she got with Sammy, she started to get nervous. Jumpy.”

I didn’t know a thing about apprenticing at a tattoo parlor or doing body piercings, but it did seem to me that jumpiness and nerves were not the kind of thing you’d look for in this line of work.

“Do you have any idea what they are involved in?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Do you think she’s in danger?”

“You mean physical danger? Like he might do her harm?”

My stomach churned.

Maxine looked at me, and I knew she was thinking this was a job for someone with a little more experience. I also knew that, like me, she believed the Lord had brought us this far and would see us to the end, no matter what.

“Does he hit her?” I asked.

“If I knew he did that, if I ever had any evidence of that, I would have stepped in.”

Maxine finally spoke, and I wondered if she meant the message as much for me as for Abner. “She wouldn’t have listened to you.”

“I know. But maybe
he
would have.” He curled his hand into a fist.

“That’s not the way we generally do things on our team.” Maxine’s tone was soothing but uncompromising.

He relaxed his hand and met my gaze. “What makes you think she’s going to listen to you?”

“She probably won’t,” Maxine said.

I sighed. “But we have to try.”

“Gotcha.” He dipped his head to acknowledge our effort. “I hope you find her, then, and that you…you know…make a difference.”

In other words, he didn’t think two chubby old ladies could pull a lost little lamb like that from the brink of whatever danger she had chosen for herself.

“We’re not alone,” I said. “We have some other friends—and, of course, the Lord. We’ll keep looking.”

He nodded. “Guess there isn’t much else to do, then.”

“Pray for her,” I suggested.

“I do,” he said, and I had no doubt that he did.

Now the problem with looking for lost sheep is that they can get themselves into all kind of places where shepherds and middle-aged Christian ladies might not always have a strong foothold. But that doesn’t mean we should just stay home and knit.

S
ome say beauty is only skin-deep. But then, so are most rashes. And so are those tattoos down at Body Art by Abner, some of which made my skin itch, just looking at them.

I often wonder about the people who get tattoos like that, if they give any thought to when those ornaments and the bodies sporting them are no longer a thing of beauty. I mean, in sixty or seventy years, will sweet young caregivers named Hazel and Ike, working in senior settings, use those faded barbed-wire armbands and withered hip-riding butterflies to tell all the Lindsays and Ashtons apart? Do these children not understand what happens to skin with age? A whole bouquet of red roses on a fellow’s shoulder at twenty will more closely resemble a bowl of raisins, with hair sprouting out of some of them, at sixty.

And what about those piercings? Some young people have turned their entire heads into pincushions. Most of them don’t even know what a pincushion is, either! Some
of them have enough metal in their faces to attract magnets right off their grandma’s fridge, which I think is a pretty clear way of saying,
Hey, look at me!
But when you do—look at them, you know—they get all surly and say,
What are you looking at?
and I want to grab a mirror and hold it up, saying,
Isn’t it obvious?
Though some people might say that us oldsters aren’t much better, with our dyed hair and bright-colored accessories, and that it’s all vanity, I say…

“Odessa?”

“What, Maxine?”

“Beauty may be skin deep, but babbling bores clean into the brain.”

“Point taken.”

Beauty is more than skin deep, and we all know it. That doesn’t mean a person shouldn’t try to clean up and look presentable whenever possible.

“Good job.”

“Thank you.”

Clink.

“Where to now, Odessa?” Into the truck we hopped again, and out we went into the wide, wide world—by way of the narrow path prescribed in the Bible, of course.

To get from where we’d parked to go to the tattoo parlor to Main Street required a sharp turn and getting us over a big, jutting bump of concrete. That bumper-chunker, as anyone who ever went over it too fast and surveyed the damage later might call it, marked the end of the pothole-pitted back alley and the beginning of the main roads. Those very main roads were the ones that high-profile taxpayers used, and so they were kept in much better shape. I
held on to the steering wheel with both hands, both forearms and one knee, to try to make the transition smooth going for my pal and me. That’s what friends do, isn’t it? Try to make life smooth going whenever they can?

That’s all I wanted for our flea market foundlings, after all. To try to smooth the way and illuminate their feet and, well, yes, maybe give them a push in the right direction. But to do that, I had to find my foundlings, and right now one had gone astray.

I eased my truck onto Main and took a left on Mockingbird. Gloria’s contact sheet had listed phone numbers, but the only addresses had been the e-mail kind. But I thought since Chloe worked around here, she might live around here, and if she lived around here, she might just be, as the kids say, hanging out around here. If the kids still say that. If not, you know what I mean. “Let’s see. If you were a girl…”

“I
was.
Once.” Maxine resumed her straight-armed position in the passenger seat.

“If you were
Chloe…
” I began again.

Sincerity, not sarcasm or even the tiniest hint of contempt, filled Maxine’s expression, and she shook her head, saying, “Oh, I was
never
her.”

“Not even a little bit?” I caught Maxine’s gaze, and though I have no proof whatsoever that I am capable of doing this, I felt sure that I had a twinkle in my eye. It suggested that I thought my upright and proper friend
had
had a bit of an, uh…flamboyant streak in her youth.

She pressed her lips tight, and for a second I thought I wasn’t going to hear a peep out of her. Not even the slightest concession, much less a full and complete con
fession. But suddenly a schoolbus filled with kids trundled by, and she sighed. “As soon as I walked far enough down the street that I knew my mama, nor any of her friends, nor any of my friend’s mamas, nor anyone from church, would see me, I rolled up my skirt at the waistband to hike it up to my knees and put on pink frosted lipstick.”

“Why, Maxine! You wild thing! I am shocked!” I wasn’t. I could totally see Maxine looking achingly adorable with her skinny legs poking out of a box-pleated plaid skirt and her smile framed by sugared bubble-gum-colored lips. But what I’d said wasn’t a lie. It was hyperbole. In other words, I was making something big out of something ordinary, just for the joy of reveling in said bigness and the foolishness that often accompanies it. It’s a Southern thing. And speaking of making something big out of nothing, you know I just had to ask, “Did you also tease up your hair?”

“Oh, no!” It was Maxine’s turn to look shocked. But her response was clearly the real deal, not a sky-high case of Texas hyperbole. “I didn’t dare mess with my hair!”

She touched the cropped-short-and-too-cute-for-words cut that she now wore.

I checked my own coiffure-du-jour in the rearview mirror. It didn’t have the flair of my circa-1960 upswept beehive, but it still had style. Big style. And so I smiled and waited for Maxine to finish her story.

“No, ma’am. I did not try anything fancy with my hair. Not after all the things my aunts and older sister did to get it ironed and flattened out and softened and straight so that they could slick it down and curl it up and give me that immovable stiff flip.” She made a motion along the side of her
head and shoulder to show the line her hair would have followed in those days.

“Kicky,” I said, using the vernacular of the day—after
keen
and before
groovy.
“Me? I used to tease mine, but I really could never get enough height to suit me.”

“I can see that about you.” Her eyes lifted to the top curls of my pumped-up and pale-streaked hairdo.

“You should have seen me on my wedding day!”

“Oh, my! I bet they had to put a red flashing beacon in your do to ward off low-flying aircraft.”

“Rhinestones.”

“Rhinestones?”

“I had twinkling rhinestones sewn into my three-tiered quarter-length veil, complete with blusher. You know, the…” I motioned with one hand to show something covering my face, then being lifted away.

“Yes. Yes, the…uh, I know what you mean.” Maxine made the same motion. “I refused to have one of those, even though I think Mama and Daddy thought I should, tradition and all. But I said no, I am going into this with my eyes wide open, thank you very much!”

A woman who kept her own name and hyphenated it with her minister husband’s name, she would think of a thing like that.

“But then, for me, after that one last gasp…”

“Gasp?”

“The rhinestone veil. Everybody said it was time to put aside childish things—”

“Childish? How is showing some personal flair childish? How is being yourself childish?”

I stared straight ahead. The town where I had grown up,
where almost everyone I knew had grown up, the place where I had formed all of my attachments and most of my ideas, stretched out before me. And Maxine’s question expanded inside me.
How is being yourself childish?
“I don’t know. It’s just what everyone said.”

“Everyone?”

“My mother, for one.” I loved my mama, but she believed that things should be done a certain way, and woe to anyone who got them out of order or colored outside the lines.

I didn’t have to say all that to Maxine for her to comprehend it, either. Mothers of Castlerock of a certain era, no matter what their races, tended to come from the same mold. “Uh-huh.”

I came to a stop sign and stopped. And stayed stopped while I added softly, “And David.”

“David?” That caused Maxine to turn loose of the dashboard and twist her whole upper body around to face me. “Your own husband called you childish?”

He
had,
and I remembered exactly when and what over. I did not turn to Maxine, however, when I said, in a sheepish voice, “When I got upset about losing the few pieces I had of my Hostess Queen partyware.”

“Few pieces? I assumed you had the whole set at one time!”

“Something that showy?” Now I did look at her. I mean, Maxine was talking crazy talk for even suggesting such a thing. I
had
to look at her when I explained. “For a bride and groom right out of seminary? No. No, ma’am. I got four pieces as wedding gifts, and that was it. Mama didn’t even think I should ask for those. They were too sophisti
cated-suburban for Castlerock, she told me. Something straight out of TV.”

Maxine chuckled at that. “But you had a few pieces. All I ever had was the luncheon set—you know, eight kidney-shaped plates with a place on one side for the matching cups?”

I nodded. “What happened to them?’

“Oh, I still have them. Still in the box.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, because you know, being a minister’s wife, I never had luncheons that didn’t involve more than eight people, and even if I did, nobody I knew ate the dainty kind of lunches that would fit on those plates.”

“Castlerock,
not
the home of the sophisticated suburbanite,” I joked.

“But you had four whole pieces? And you lost them
all?
Now that’s a pity. They get broken over the years, or what?”

“Worse. They got…appropriated.” It still stuck in my craw a bit, all these years later. Stuck in my craw, and stung a little bit, too.

“Apropri—what?” Maxine folded her arms.

“You know.” I gave the truck some gas at last and went rolling slowly onto the deserted downtown street. “One morning the women’s Bible study needed something to serve refreshments, and David handed over my hot and cold beverage carafe.”

“You had that?” Maxine’s face went all dreamy. I know it’s corny, but this Hostess Queen service? It really was the stuff of dreams, back in the day.

“And my six-compartment relish tray,” I added, so she’d know exactly what had been at stake.

“He lent them
both
to the women’s Bible study?”

“I thought he lent them, but next thing I knew, somebody wrote ‘Property of’ and the church’s name and address on the bottom with a permanent marker, and that was that.”

“David didn’t get it back for you?”

“He told me not to be childish.”

“Oh, Odessa.” She put her hand on my shoulder. She didn’t need to do or say another thing. I knew she understood completely how that had made me feel.

“Same with the other pieces I had, when they got carted off for use for some church event, never to be seen again.” I sighed, turning to take us around the block one more time. “That was when I knew.”

“That you were going to dedicate the rest of your life to finding and replacing all those pieces and completing the entire set of Hostess Queen partyware? No matter how long it took? No matter how much junk you had to look through or how many vendors who had to bargain with?”

“Oh, Maxine, you say that like it’s some kind of military mission.” I sat up a little straighter, and smiled at last. “I am so proud of you!”

She beamed.

“But no.”

That, as we say around here, took the shine off her penny. She scowled my way, just a little, and with her silence asked me to explain myself.

“No, that’s not when I decided to try to replace my pieces.
That
is when I knew I was never going to come first.”

“With David?” Disbelief softened the edges of what might otherwise have sounded like a harsh accusation.

“With
anybody.
” Again, I did not look at her, but kept my
eyes on the road, and occasionally the sidewalk—because we were still looking for Chloe, after all—and drove. “I knew I was never going to be important enough to have my own full set of partyware, for one thing. And by extension I realized that anything I did manage to have or accomplish or even create was never going to be mine to keep. Not my household goods, not my children, not even my husband. I had to share with everyone, and put myself at the end of the line. Bottom of the heap.”

“Bottom of the…?” Maxine’s mouth gaped wide open. She huffed. She rolled her eyes. “Odessa Pepperdine, that is the…Oh, I just don’t know…. Odessa, if ever there was a person destined to hit the heights, you are that person.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, I do. Top of the world, Odessa, that’s where you belong. And I am so sad that you didn’t have friends and family who made you feel that way.”

I gave a faint smile.

“Well, never you mind. You have a friend like that now. One who never thought of you as the bottom of the barrel.”

“Heap. I said bottom of the heap.” There was a difference. Slight, but a difference.

“Whatever. The point is that we are in the same sisterhood, girlfriend, and from now on it’s up, up, up.” She pointed skyward.

I wanted to believe her, but… “I don’t know, Maxine. It doesn’t seem that simple. I mean, despite our present flabby, age-ravaged carcasses…”

“Excuse me?”

I cleared my throat. “Uh, despite our fabulous and ravishing…”

She sat back in her seat. “Much better.”

“…carcasses.”

Maxine held her hand up between us. “Girl, when I am around you, I never fear of suffering the sin of pride, is all I got to say.”

I smiled. “Despite all
that,
can we agree that inside each of us, we still have a sliver of that scared, insecure young girl wanting to be loved, to feel special?”

“The only sliver of anything I have in me is pie, honey. That scared little girl in me is gone for good.”

“Gone? Really?”

“Yes.”

I have to say I admire that about Maxine more than probably anything she ever told me. Because my scared young woman, my inner Chloe, Bernadette and even Jan, is still alive and kicking. And not in that hip, happening, kicky kicking way, either.