The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (5 page)

I know that even as the accidental chair of this gathering I should have had some kind of response to that, but I didn’t. My stomach grumbled. I reached for a knife to cut the cake, and blurted out the only thing that came to my cake-and-sudden-uncertainty-about-everything-addled brain. “Yum.”

Jan looked at me like maybe, just maybe, I had just implied that I found the ten names on her list positively scrumptious. I bit my lower lip to keep myself from making a truly tasteless joke about cannibalism.

“Now, Mrs. Belmont, I suspect you’re an old hand at this committee thing, just like I am.” Lack of a stretchy outfit notwithstanding, Maxine was coming straight to my rescue. She set the coffee cup in front of the pinch-faced former cheerleader in the pink-on-pink outfit with hair sprayed stiff enough to withstand a category-three hurricane and announced, “Ten names is fine. Realistically, we should be happy if half that many people show up. And for the first meeting, folks do tend to straggle in.”

“I don’t—that is,
we
don’t—have time for stragglers. This situation needs immediate attention. Tear it down, I say.” She faltered, and for an instant I thought she might actually go all teary-eyed. There was something more at work here, I suspected, than just her frustration over the dirt, the health issues and the tacky knickknacks. Then her expression shifted. Grew cold. She crossed her arms, her back rigid. “Someone is going to get hurt out there, I tell you.”

Someone already has.
She didn’t say it. Yet it resonated after the words she had spoken, like a faint echo. For an instant, I wanted to go to her, put my arm around her shoulders, to lend comfort and perhaps find out what she really had against the flea market. It would do her good to unburden herself about it, no doubt, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to know what those of us who wanted to keep the place open were up against. I had almost begun to feel like a real dog for thinking that last bit, when Maxine growled out her own opinion.

“Someone is going to get hurt out there?” Maxine passed me on her way back to the kitchenette counter. “If that poor woman doesn’t settle down, someone is going to get hurt in
here.
”

I followed my friend, feeling a bit like a lost pup. But I did remember my manners enough to ask, as I caught a whiff of the wicked-strong brew in the clear glass carafe, “How about you, Reverend? Coffee?”

“Thank you.” He nodded, then pulled out the chair next to Jan’s, thrust out his hand and opened his mouth.

“I don’t know whether to slap you on the back and sing your praises for coming up with this idea, or file a complaint with the city of Castlerock and get our attorney to start sending out cease-and-desist letters.” With that, Bernadette’s mother took the room.

Took
it. Gloria Perry Alvarez does not simply walk into any given space. She occupies it. She commandeers it. She was just that kind of woman.

Reverend Cordell closed his mouth, but boy, did his eyes open up wide.

“If you truly want to ditch this committee, I have a feeling we won’t have any problems finding any number of
people to run it in your stead.” Maxine pointed her gaze first at Jan, then at Gloria.

Did I dare do that to poor Reverend Cordell? And of course our…

“Bernadette! Stop lollygaggin’.” Only a woman like Gloria Alvarez could use a word like
lollygaggin’
and make it sound so crisp, so elegant, and so utterly condescending. You could practically hear her eyes roll in the way she made the hard
g
sound low in her throat. “Bring that box in here pronto.”

Jan’s head whipped up, and you could feel the first crackle of competition for control of the committee.

Jan had come with a timetable and that list of members to hold over my head. Gloria had one-upped her by bringing this mysterious box. This box that, in fact, required another person to tote it in for her.

“What box?” Jan asked, uncrossing her legs so fast her foot slapped against the cold vinyl floor.

“Over the last six months that the flea market has been open, we’ve collected a number of letters and complaints about it. Up until now we’ve just stuffed them in one of those big portable cardboard file boxes.” Gloria spread her arms out to indicate a container of considerable size and heft. “I have Bernadette lugging it in from the car.”

Lugging?

The first time Jake Cordell would lay eyes on our girl, she would be submissively lugging something into the room at her mother’s bidding. Not good.

I put my hand to my throat. “You know, Maxine, it’s not that I have my heart set on seeing these two make it to happily-ever-after land. I just want…”

“You want Bernadette to have the same shot at making a good impression on the man as any other girl.” Maxine placed her hand on my shoulder. “And if that good impression leads to something more?”

“Because Bernadette wants it to lead to something more, not because we think she must get married to be happy.” I said it the way superstitious people knock on wood to keep a bad thing at bay. Not from superstition, though, but from a need to have it out in the open that I still understood and respected the ways of romance, the hearts and wishes of the couple involved and the will of God in these matters.

“You just want her to have a nice ‘how I met your daddy’ story to tell that doesn’t involve her mama using her to haul city records into a damp church basement like some big-boned zaftig pack mule.”

“That’s all I’m saying.” I turned to my friend. “Is that so much to ask?”

“Apparently.” She looked past me, toward the doorway.

“You should be lifting your own babies and little children, Bernadette. You should have a big, strong husband to carry that for you.” Gallina Roja backed into the room. Her hands flapped with every word, and her bony little wings—um,
arms
—swung back and forth, giving the impression that she thought her granddaughter might crumple under the weight of the dark brown cardboard file box at any moment and she would need to catch the contents, piece by piece, like a circus performer gathering juggling pins. “Get that thing in here and do something with yourself before the new minister sees you and decides he should become a priest.”

At that suggestion, Jake Cordell stood up. Whether he in
tended to go over and offer to take the box from Bernadette, or had just gotten to his feet out of deference at the ladies’ having entered the room, I don’t know. I will never know, because he had hardly taken a step away from his folding metal chair when his whole face lit up and his hand went swinging outward in greeting.

“Well, hey, there. You must be this Bernadette I’ve heard so much about. I am definitely very pleased to meet—”

Crack.

Splat.

Ooph.

In short order, the seam of the box split.

The contents pitched forward and hit the floor. Bernadette lurched. Trying to save herself, she clomped down her shoe, hit a piece of paper and started to flail and skid—until she plunked down on her well-padded bottom and went sprawling right at the poorly shod feet of Jake Cordell and the scuffed-up army boots of the young girl who ran the health-food booth.

That girl hardly missed a beat as she faced the man who had so clearly been enamored of her quiet entrance by saying, “No, my name is Chloe Morgan. I believe
that’s
Bernadette.”

As I believe I’ve mentioned, there is much to be said for the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. At least as far as committees are concerned.

Maxine and I certainly had tried to keep our mouths shut about our matchmaking agenda. But somehow it always seems that a woman like Bernadette ends up looking like she has two left feet.

T
hey say you never get a second chance at a first impression. When you meet new people, they pretty much make up their minds about you in less than a minute. No wonder commercials no longer bother to tell clever stories or offer testimonials. They know you are not going to take the time to listen and observe, to compare and evaluate. So they shout, tout and get out.

That’s the reality of things these days. We are living in a shout-tout-and-get-out world. The clock is ticking. Impress me, or don’t waste my time. One minute. That’s a lot of pressure for a person like Bernadette, who in all probability hasn’t actually made up her own mind about herself, about who she really is and, most importantly, about who she is capable of being.

“So, what do you think about Jake?” I asked Bernadette the next day as we stood in the side lot of the old drive.

In my brilliance and, frankly, my desperation to save the day and grant Bernadette that most unlikely of gifts—a second chance—I had suggested that those who had showed up for our first council meeting should form into two subcommittees.

It made sense, really, because by the time we got all the spilled papers cleared away and the introductions over with, Jan had to leave to pick up her husband from physical therapy. And because Jake and Chloe seemed to hit it off, and Gloria continued to snap at her daughter, and that still-red-headed terror Gallina Roja kept scratching around trying to find out if Jake was the marrying type, we weren’t getting any work done….

And by work, I mean matchmaking, of course. I took it upon myself, as the chairperson, to tip the scales a little bit in Bernadette’s favor. And to divide the group up according to their interests and abilities.
Really.

You see, Jan and Chloe were on the side of closing the place down. Gloria had all those complaints to share, and Gallina Roja? I have my own mother-in-law, thank you very much. I did not need to deal with somebody else’s while trying to conduct my first-ever action council.

So Maxine, the Reverend Cordell, Bernadette and I took charge of the side of making the flea market more community-friendly. It’s not my fault that that also fit in with my goal of making the Reverend more Bernadette-friendly.

We all agreed that our first step should be to go over and eyeball the premises on a non flea market day. Which led me to be standing by Bernadette the next day, asking, “So? What did you think of him?”

“Jake?” Bernadette fidgeted for a few seconds with the
humongous ring of keys she’d picked up from the man who owned the drive-in property. Then she gave me a sly look—half teasing, half warning that I should tread lightly. “What is there to think about him?”

Tread lightly?
Had the girl not spent
any
time in my company? Besides, I’d seen the look in her eyes when Jake spoke to her over the mess she dumped at his feet Wednesday. Not love at first sight, but something even more powerful. She liked the guy. They
clicked.

Something in her gaze said, “I know neither one of us is perfect, but I don’t mind if you don’t.” Hope, and the acceptance of someone, flaws and all—if there was ever anything more powerful than lightning-bolt love, that was it.

But Bernadette had a bad first impression to overcome, and one did not do that by treading lightly.

“The Reverend Cordell.” I waved, big and bold, at the man unfolding his long legs from a nondescript compact car under a big old pecan tree. I went so far as to reach up on tiptoe to extend myself and make sure he saw me—
us.
I don’t know how he could have missed us, of course, Bernadette’s cumbersome white service van and my big old truck being the only vehicles parked in the flat expanse along the side of the drive-in. “So what do you think?”

“About…?” she said, and I just knew she was playing coy.

I pointed, shielding the gesture from the man’s view with my body.

“Oh, about
Jake.
” Bernadette said the man’s name as if she’d said it before.
A lot.
Over and over. The way someone does when they practice for a chance meeting—a much-anticipated and intricately planned for chance meeting, that is. “I like him fine.”

She turned toward him and raised her hand to wave, too. Then, seeing that he was preoccupied with trying to clean up those sad old shoes, she dropped her hand to her side. She let out a low breath and chewed her lower lip.

If I’d let her, she would have stood right there and talked herself out of any kind of a chance with the fellow.
Oh, no, not on my watch.
I gave her shoulder a nudge. “Go welcome him out here.”

“Me?”

“Well, you are the tour guide du jour, aren’t you?”

She looked at me, then at the old concrete Satellite Vista Drive-In sign, then at the keys in her hand, and a slow smile worked its way across her pretty face.

“Go.”

It was a hot day, even for the first week of July, and I welcomed the shade of the trees around us, both for their cooling effect and for the way they hid any telltale show of nerves on my part.

She hurried off without a speck of further encouragement.

I shook my head and joined Maxine, who had been sitting in my truck pouting, because she really hadn’t wanted to devote this kind of time to my made-up-on-the-spot concerned-citizens’ action council. She’d argued that she just wasn’t all
that
concerned, and didn’t see why she should have to get her shoes muddy tromping around a place she was going to come to and spend the day at twenty-four hours from now anyway. So I had a hard time this morning getting her to budge from the comfort of my truck.

This truck, now, it’s a hoot, if I do say so myself. Maxine calls it the “Mama-mobile,” and thinks we should paint
it pink and glue acrylic gems all over the hood. David and I bought it to haul shrubs and mulch and landscaping tools and all manner of concrete lawn ornaments that we thought for sure would become a part of our daily life in retirement. Two years now, and I haven’t lifted a spade, planted a bush or found a home for a single red-capped garden gnome. But I do love to tool around town, windows down and attitude up, in my beat-up old truck. It’s way more fun than a chubby pale-haired lady ought to have. Certainly more fun than Jake and Bernadette were having.

“Young people!” I folded my arms and pressed my hip to the front fender of the truck. “Left to their own devices, I wonder if any of them would ever find one another and start to work on producing the next generation.”

“Folks been managing to do it for a whole lot of years without your help, Odessa. I have an inkling most of them just might get the job done, despite your misgivings.”

“Some of them.” I watched Bernadette, the hem of her bright print dress floating around her sturdy but still lovely legs as she flounced up to the minister.

He stepped back, his hands up, and said something. Probably some lame joke, telling her not to hurt him today.

She stopped short and looked at the ground.

“But those two?” The tableau they made just about broke my heart. “They are going to need all the help we can give them.”

“We?”
Maxine looked genuinely surprised.

I found it cute that, regardless of how much she likes to tell people she knows exactly what I have in mind and usually wants no part of it, I could still catch her off guard. “You
know, Maxine, I have never been one of those women who meddled in other people’s lives.”

She said nothing.

“You’re not going to argue with that?”

“I’m still trying to decide how I got dragged into this we-have-to-help-those-two notion of yours.” She got out of the truck and shut the door soundly behind her. “As for you saying you don’t meddle in other people’s lives…? Well, a statement like that is the kind of thing I’d have to leave between you and the Lord, because…” She winced, looked skyward, then cocked her head and aimed her gaze square at me. “Odessa, there are times when being a sister in Christ and being a woman of good manners just plain clash. For me, that used to happen maybe once or twice in a decade. Now, every day I spend with you, it happens once or twice…an hour!”

“You have issues with me, Sister Cooke-Nash?” A quick glance showed the targets of my matchmaking walking our way, Jake in long confident strides and Bernadette…What was she thinking, wearing those espadrilles out here? I mean, they are too cute for words, but look at the height on those heels and the flimsy ribbons around her ankles! She is going to fall flat on her face. Or worse. I could see the two of them trying to explain how they both got mud-covered backsides! Texas in the summer wasn’t usually a wet place, but somehow the whole flea market parking lot and the walkway into the place seemed to remain forever soggy. Bernadette knew that. And she should have taken it into account. “You know, I have my nurse’s shoes behind the seat of the truck. Do you think I should get them out and insist she get herself into some sensible footwear before—”

Maxine laughed. “Odessa Pepperdine, you are the most meddlesome woman I have ever met. How can I stand here and listen to you say otherwise and not have issues with it?”

“Fair enough.” I laughed, too.

Then I put my hand on her arm and swiveled her around to see what I saw. Bernadette clumping and wobbling along, clutching her skirt for dear life, all the while trying to make light conversation and maintain control over her windswept hair and the cumbersome keys in her hand.

Maxine sighed, and I knew she had begun to see my point.

We’d been told we could come out today if we parked along the side, out of sight of the road. That meant we had to walk around the chipped but still impressive screen of the drive-in screen to get to the gate where everyone entered on flea market day. I don’t think Bernadette had considered that little hike when she had dressed this morning, and I could just imagine her stomach clenching as she thought about the kinds of things her mother and grandmother might say to her about the foolishness of her choices. I was wondering what I might call out or do to help her along when Jake finally paused and reached down to slip the keys from Bernadette’s hand.

She tipped her head up to look into his eyes. There were not many men who stood over her that way, and I could tell she liked the new experience. She said something, glanced down, then lifted one foot and rotated her ankle.

Jake laughed and held his arms up, and I could just imagine him saying,
Here, jump in my arms and I’ll carry you away.

Then, without making a big deal out of it, he offered her his arm to steady her as they began to walk toward us again.

Big sigh.
“I mean, I was never one of those who found it her place to meddle in people’s love lives. To try to get everyone neatly paired up and married off.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“But I just have this good feeling about Bernadette and Jake.”

“A good feeling about…” She put her hands on her hips. “Were you not at the church yesterday? Because I honestly believe that was you I saw there setting up this subcommittee and arranging for us to come out here this warm Thursday morning to take a tour of the place without the distraction of the flea market traffic and vendors.”

“What’s your point?”

“Did you not see that travesty yesterday? The man thinks the girl is a klutz. And he is not wrong in that thinking.”

“Klutziness is no obstacle to love, Maxine.” Though it suddenly occurred to me that if she stumbled while hanging on to his arm, and he ended up twisting his ankle or tearing his shirt, it might be an obstacle to other things—like wanting to ever be around her again. Now
that
would be an obstacle to love. “But I think, once he sees her here in her natural setting—”

“Her natural setting? She’s not an exotic bird released into the wild.” Maxine flapped her arms a couple times to bring home her point. “She is a never-married bridal-and-formalwear retailer who has a small and a tiny bit tacky booth peddling classy things at a not-so-classy flea market to people like you and me who stop to ooh and aah over them but never buy a thing, Odessa. Seeing her
here
is only going to cement in the man’s mind that she is always out of her element.”

“No. You don’t think that of her, do you?”

“I think…Odessa, honey, all your good intentions aside, I think that anybody who has that feeble self-esteem and that family of hers will always seem out of her element until she learns to stand up for herself. You want to help Bernadette? You help her do that. Don’t try to get her married off to a minister. You of all people know how easy it is to lose yourself in that role.”

It was good advice.

I’ve never been good at taking good advice.

The pair reached us and greeted us. I must have smiled a little too long or too sweetly at them, because after a second or two, Jake glanced down at the arm Bernadette was holding, then at me, and then stuck out his other arm. It had all the markings of saying to me that he wanted to make me feel included, but I knew that to Bernadette it said what everyone from her closest family to the delivery boy who praised her company’s name really thought.
You are nothing special, girl.

I refused the offer with a pat, then stood back to let them lead the way around to the front of the drive-in.

“Don’t you see, Maxine?” I tugged on her to keep her from marching right up and joining the others. “By doing nothing more than getting the Reverend to notice her, and thereby giving herself a chance to decide if she wants to go out on a date with him—just one little date—then she will be standing up for herself. She will show her family she is more than they say she is. And did you hear Mrs. Davenport the other day? All the people she has worked so hard to serve for so long pushed her aside for their own gain. If she doesn’t rally against that…”

“They will hold sway over her the rest of her life. And heaven help her if one of them should actually succeed in marrying off one of
their
candidates to that poor man.”

“Salt in the wound,” I whispered, my eyes shut tight against the very thought of it. When I opened my eyes again, I could see I’d gotten to Maxine. I’d made my sale, but I hadn’t driven it home. “Think of it, Maxine. Bernadette is like Cinderella, and we’re her…”