The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (8 page)

“We saw you.”

“How?” Every last bit of color drained from her face. Even her salon-bought tan seemed to wash away. “How could you see me?”

“Well, not
me.
” I shifted my weight, glanced back at the still-open door, then at Mr. Belmont, who had not moved an inch or changed his expression. “Bernadette and Chloe and Reverend Cordell saw you. From the hot-air balloon.” I threw that last part in, as if it made perfect sense.

She blinked at me.

“They’re outside.”

“In a hot-air balloon?” She almost sounded hopeful, like maybe she thought we had come to whisk her up, up and away. Away from her worry. Away from spotless floors, where everyone trod so lightly it scarcely left a footprint, and fanned-out magazines that no one ever read or touched. Away from her husband and his easy chair and the constant blare of the television set.

“No, we came in Bernadette’s van. We had been over at the drive-in, to take a tour of the place without any booths or people there. You know, to see what we were dealing with in terms of the layout of things and what kind of
shape everything is really in.” I was babbling again, but at least this time she seemed to follow me. She nodded. Her perfectly plucked eyebrows pinched together above the bridge of her nose. She even glanced in the general direction of the driveway without any perceptible hint of anger in her eyes.

This was good. This was all good. Jan Belmont was listening to me. I had no idea if I was making sense to her, but she was listening. Hadn’t I started all this to help both Bernadette
and
Jan? And here God had given me what appeared to be the chance to reach out to Jan. I couldn’t let it slip away.

“Why don’t you come with us?” I said.

“But that’s not my subcommittee.”

“It’s not Chloe’s, either, but there she is!” I took a step back and gave the others a wave. As soon as Maxine started toward the door, that simple means of greeting turned into a panic-driven attempt to keep the lot of them at bay. I did everything but shout,
Shoo, y’all! I have this covered!

I didn’t have it covered, of course, but God did. And I saw no reason to tromp on His plans by bringing everyone into Jan’s disquieted little world.

“I would love to, to do anything to get out of the house, but I hate to leave Morty.”

“Is there any reason Morty can’t come with us?” I don’t know where that question came from. In truth, the last thing I wanted was to haul Morty out of his easy chair and into the world of the Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Action Council. But I had said it. I had promised to make myself an instrument of God’s plans, and that was what had come out of my mouth. I couldn’t take it back.

“I, uh…I suppose Morty could come along.” For the first time since I’d gotten there, Jan looked at her husband. Her whole countenance shifted, softened…saddened. There was no mistaking the look on her face then. She loved the man.

He stared back at her with the same intensity he had shown the picture window.

“I want to get him out more. He has to have someone with him, in case he gets unsteady. And of course he can’t drive, so unless the kids come home or somebody comes to get him…”

He looked her way then. His eyes narrowed, and he began to shuffle off again toward the dark blob of a chair.

She bowed her head. “He doesn’t like having to depend on me and me alone so much.”

I dared to touch her shoulder, just barely. “There isn’t a one of us that couldn’t use more than one person looking out for us, I suspect.”

She smiled, briefly. So briefly I actually doubted it at all. Then she nodded, grabbed my wrist and took a deep breath.

Head up, she turned to face her husband, who had draped himself across that old recliner. In the time it took for her to go from facing me to speaking to her husband, Jan’s whole face brightened. “Did you hear that, honey? Mrs. Pepperdine is inviting you to join us on our tour of the drive-in grounds. What do you say? Don’t you want to get out?”

He just stared at the TV.

“Excuse me a minute.” Jan went into the living room and said something to him.

He did not turn his head or acknowledge her in any way.

She spoke again.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. I felt I had to stand there and witness this, to show Jan that I did not feel ashamed of her—or for her.

“Morty?” Her shoulders slumped. She hung her head. After a second, she gathered her composure, then took up the remote control and turned the sound down. “Mrs. Pepperdine wants us both to come with them out to the old drive-in. You know, for the committee I’m on, to…”

She didn’t finish.

But then it didn’t matter.

Morty wasn’t listening. And if she had any question at all about that, he proved it to her by raising up the remote, pointing it firmly at the TV and cranking the volume up full.

“I’m sorry.” Jan took my arm and headed toward the door. “I don’t think we can make it today.”

“But, Jan, you could still…”

She opened the door. “Give my regards to the others, please.”

“But I never found out why you were on the roof,” I whispered.

“Oh, didn’t you?” She raised an eyebrow and then, pointedly, her face a mask of propriety and pain, she fixed her gaze on the man in the chair.

I wanted to burst into tears, but instead I simply nodded and started through the door.

“I’ll see you Friday, when I drop off my baked goods,” she said, her eyes as distant as her husband’s had been earlier.

“Friday,” I said softly. I took another step and then, knowing with all my heart that God had brought me here, and without one bit of concern for how it would look to my
friends or the neighbors, did what I knew God would have me do. I pulled Jan Belmont into the biggest, warmest, most heartfelt hug I knew how to give.

She did not respond in kind.

I didn’t care. And I didn’t turn loose of her until I had said a quick prayer.

Morty Belmont was no longer weighed down with the cumbersome casts and braces meant to help his body heal. He wore his brokenness in other ways. And his wife did everything she could to hide hers.

Appearances can be deceiving, but God is steadfast. He had used a threat and a hot-air balloon to make me look beneath the surface and see how much my sister in Christ needed me.

“T
hey say when God closes a door, He opens a window.”

Maxine replied, “That’s pretty handy if there’s someone you want to push
out
a window!”

I guess we shouldn’t have been making fun like that, especially given Morty Belmont’s fall, but the thing is, there are just times when you have to laugh or you think you’ll do something drastic. And since a few hours after we left the Belmonts’ house I’d convinced Bernadette to go and do something drastic…well, the least I could do was sprinkle a little humor into the mix and pray for the best.

So that’s how it was that the predawn hours of Friday morning found Maxine and me sailing through the streets of Castlerock in my truck. Destination? The Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market, where we had taken on the assignment of running Bernadette’s booth for the day while she trained a new employee to work out of the shop in her home a couple days a week. Yes, what you are thinking I
did is
exactly
what I did. I talked Bernadette into hiring Jan part-time. Given Bernadette’s nature and what we had seen at Jan’s home yesterday, it hadn’t taken much, just a reminder of how much Jan needed the money and the respite and a promise that Maxine and I would do whatever we could,
for free,
to pitch in and…

“Maxine Cooke-Nash and Odessa Pepperdine—businesswomen!”

“Would you stop saying that?” Maxine covered her ears, sort of. I mean, if she really hadn’t wanted to hear me, she’d have stuck her fingers in her ears and started singing—probably a hymn. A real rafter-raiser like “Up from the Grave He Arose” or “Standing on the Promises,” so she could really drown me out.

“En-tra-prah-new-wars.” I sounded it out with a particularly bodacious Texas twang, if I do say so myself.

“Aren’t-we-too-clue-less?” She parroted my accent, twang for twang. “That’s more like it. Odessa, we have no idea what we are doing.”

“Yes, we do! We’re helping!” I didn’t say who or what, because deep down I had the gut feeling we were helping the Lord more than we were helping any actual people. That is, helping the Lord help people. And I knew that if I put forth that idea, Maxine would suggest that if the Lord needed help with anything, He would have better resources than us. And she would be factual in that belief, though I can’t say she could be right. “I can’t hide my excitement here, Maxine. This is the first time I’ve ever worked at a real job, aside from motherhood and being an extension of David’s ministry, since…ever.”

“Are you kidding?” Maxine braced herself, straight
armed, against the dashboard. She used to hang on to the door handle, but one day, going around a particularly sharp curve, she yanked the thing clean open. This is not your sophisticated, modern all-electric and computer-regulated pickup truck here, y’all. Ever since then, she’s clung to the dashboard instead, to make up for the bad springs in the seats, the bad shocks on the passenger side and the bad driver behind the wheel! So, braced for anything, she tipped her head to one side and eyeballed me good, her tone completely sweet but nonetheless incredulous as she asked, “You’ve never gotten out of the house and gone off to a job?”

“And you have?” I asked, also incredulous but distinctly less sweet. Whenever Maxine and I discussed our lives, they always seem to run side by side. In fact, they seemed so similar that I just assumed her life choices, especially about something as significant as being a working-outside-the-house mom or a stay-at-home mom, would be exactly the same.

“I sure have.” She abandoned the dashboard death grip long enough to fold her arms across her bosom, all defiant-like. But that classic Maxine twinkle in her eye told me she wasn’t setting herself up as my worldly superior when she proclaimed, “I was a carhop at the A&W.”

“You were not!” I shot back, so fast I practically gave myself whiplash.

“You calling me a liar?” Maxine scootched over to the far side of the seat and gave me what older rural types around here would call the stank eye—meaning she scrunched one eye all up till it was nothing but wrinkles and opened the other eye so big it almost looked buggy.

I laughed, because I knew she didn’t think I was actually calling her a liar and because how can you not laugh at a woman of so much grace and dignity who doesn’t shy away from throwing the stank eye on her best friend when the occasion calls for it? “No, I was expressing my…When were you a carhop at the A&W?”

“When? Odessa Pepperdine! When I was in high school!” Now both eyes popped open wide and her smile broke through, even as she laughed lightly under her breath. “You don’t think I made a career of carrying frosty root-beer mugs out to car windows, do you?”

“No. Not at all.” Though I admit I did take a moment then and there to picture her as she looked today, with her carefully coiffed hair, meticulous makeup and senior citizen figure, in one of those orange-and-brown uniforms. And shame on me for it, but it made me giggle, just a little. Then I got right back to the conversations. “I just…Maxine, if you worked at the A&W, then there is an almost inescapable chance that you carried trays out to my car when I’d go there with all my friends after games and things. And I never even noticed you.”

“Well, why would you?” She sighed and adjusted her shoulders, pressing them back against the cheap faux sheepskin seat cover. “It was 1961 in America, which made it roughly 1938 in Castlerock, civil-rights-wise.”

Tension bristled in the cab of my bouncy old truck. This was a subject we had broached now and again, but we had, for the most part, decided that it was in the past and we had come too far and loved each other too much to let it mar our friendship now. But that did not erase the realities. We came from different worlds, Maxine and me, and in many
fundamental ways it made us different women and that would always be so.

She pursed her lips and kept her gaze facing forward. “Why would a carful of middle-class blondes notice a dark-skinned girl in a carhop’s uniform bringing them foot-long chili dogs and Teen Burgers?”

“Oh, Teen Burgers!” That did it. The memory broke the tension, and all but broke my ability to concentrate on my driving, as well. I could practically feel the foiled paper crinkling around the things and smell the aroma of the drive-in restaurant’s long-ago specialty. It almost made me drive off the road. “With bacon!”

“Bacon!”
Maxine’s eyes lit up, and just that fast, we went from racially divergent oldsters to women of the same sisterhood. The sisterhood of women who know bacon is deadly to your arteries but cannot resist its crispy deliciousness.

“Let’s go to the Wagon Wheel Diner and get a great big breakfast before we go out to the flea market and open up shop for Bernadette.”

“We can’t. As vendors, we have a responsibility to get her booth and goods there and ready for display before the gates open to buyers.”

“Well, that’s no fun,” I grumbled, wetting my lips as if I could still taste the bacon and gravy that had slipped through our fingers…um, teeth?

“You should have thought of that before you volunteered us to do this.”

“I had to do it, Maxine. You saw poor Jan and that husband of hers. She needs an outlet.”

“Yeah, so she can plug a cattle prod into that outlet and make that man get out of his chair.”

“Maxine!”

“I know. That wasn’t very delicate or Christian-sounding, but sometimes I am not a very delicate Christian. I personally don’t think Jesus was particularly politically correct. He spoke His mind and told that man on the pallet to take up his bed and walk.”

“That
is
true.”

“Well, someone needs to say the same to Morty Belmont.”

“I have David going out there.” It didn’t feel like my place to call in the current minister. You know, that whole I-don’t-meddle speech I’d made to Maxine, coming to bite me in the, uh…ankle. But to ask my husband to drop by and see what he could do to cheer up a former member of his flock—that’s not meddling, is it? Well, if it is or if it isn’t, I did it. “There’s not much more we can do for Jan’s husband.”

“But getting Bernadette to hire Jan to work at the business a couple days a week?”

I followed the signs to the exhibitors’ parking lot and flashed Bernadette’s pass to the woman standing by an orange-and-white barricade there. She waved us on through and said we could only stay in the unloading zone for ten minutes, so to only use it if we had big things that we couldn’t navigate through the parking lot. Except she didn’t use the word
navigate.
She peppered her instructions with the kind of cursing that passes for ordinary language these days, and she didn’t take the cigarette out of her mouth until she gestured toward Bernadette’s spot.

After brushing ashes off my bare forearm, I guided the truck into the right row, all the while talking to Maxine like I was an old pro at all of this. “Bernadette having Jan help with shipments and orders on Mondays and Wednesdays
gets Jan out of the house. It also frees up a few hours for Bernadette during the week.”

“For what? So her family and church can boss her around even more?”

“No. So
we
can.”

The wheels hit a pothole, and Maxine just missed hitting her head on the ceiling, but from her expression I had no doubt that my words had done more to jostle her than my driving. “So
we
can? So we can
what?
”

“Boss Bernadette around.” I tried to drive more gently, but one thing we hadn’t taken into account during our tour—probably because we’d been instructed to park on the side—was the pitiful shape of the big field they used for a parking lot. We had always parked far out, so as to make for an easy getaway when we reached our trashy-treasure saturation point, so I’d always assumed everyone else had better conditions. “You know, how we’re trying to give her a shot at dating the Reverend?”

“Are we still doing that?”

“Have they gone on a date yet?”
Thwump.
Another pothole.

“No,” Maxine answered, her hand protecting her head.

“Then there is still work to be done. And we are on the job, Maxine.”

“And you said you’d never worked. I guess you don’t count meddling as a full-time job?”

“I don’t meddle. I
encourage.
I’m like a…a…a…”

“Big fat meddler?”

I scowled at her. “Gardener. I am like a gardener. Encouraging tender seeds to take root and grow. To strive for their full potential.”

“There is a joke in there, about what one uses to fertilize those tender seeds and about speeches like that making me think you have a lifetime supply.” Maxine held her hand up. “But being a Godly woman, I won’t go there.”

“Good, because we’re
here.
” I pulled up to a roped-off section and cut the engine in front of a card with the number that corresponded to Bernadette’s slot in the flea market. “Let’s unload and get to setting up.”

“Okay, but after we finish and the flea market opens…? I am going to run out and get a to-go order from the Wagon Wheel for a whole breakfast spread, with extra bacon.”

“And you think I’d try to stop you?” Nothing stops Maxine. And from now on, nothing is going to stop me, either. I can do anything through Christ who strengthens me. It’s not just a verse people print on a paperweight, it’s a way of life. “And while you’re gone, I’ll be at Bernadette’s booth, showing them what I can do if left to my own devices.”

“Here, ladies, let me help you with that.” The familiar voice of a young man, the tone far too friendly and familiar, told us that we were not going to be left to our own devices.

“Oh!” Maxine clutched at the clear plastic tub of tiaras she had naturally gravitated toward carrying in.

“Why…Sammy! It’s…you.” What was I supposed to do, lie and say it was nice to see him?

“Yeah. You know, it doesn’t take no time for us to set up our operation, so after we’re good to go I always come around back here and see if I can help anyone set up.”

Bernadette had never mentioned this service. She’d explained how to sign in, how to put the tables and display
cases together, how to hook up the electronic side of things in order to do credit-card purchases, where to stash checks, and how to reach her if we needed anything. Nowhere in the two hours of prep time we’d done over dinner last night had Sammy’s name come up.

“Um, I think we have this under control, actually. I, uh…as I understand it, they have handcarts inside and we just unload onto them.”

“Yeah. If we don’t have enough to fill it up completely, I’m going to hop on and make Odessa push me on it!” Maxine snatched me by the arm and whisked me toward the back gate.

“Oh. Well, okay then. If either of you wants a real thrill ride, though, come around and try the balloon on your break. We give fellow vendors a really good…”

But by then we were inside the fenced area that was once the drive-in proper, the place that contains the main body of the flea market.

“Don’t listen to him, ladies.” Not two feet inside the vendor’s entrance, a man wearing a straw fedora and what my sons would call a retro bowling shirt was rolling a flatbed handcart, the kind they use in those huge warehouse clubs to haul small furniture and enormous boxes of detergent, over to us.

Maxine put her tub down on the gray metal surface of the cart and gave the man a wary look. “Pardon me?”

“You want some advice?” He said it a bit shifty-like, even though he would have needed two-tone shoes, a pencil-thin mustache and a warehouse-club-size tub of gel in his hair to really pull off the act. Still, I had the feeling he knew what he was talking about when he warned us, “Stay clear of that Sammy Wilson.”

“We would have loved to stay clear of him.” Maxine grabbed hold of the waist-high bar that guided the cart and wheeled it around so that we could easily load Bernadette’s goods onto it. “He just naturally seems to gravitate toward us.”

“That’s not good. Won’t make you many friends around here.”

“Why not?” I asked, before Maxine could decide to announce that we had not come here today seeking friendships.

But just that fast, the fellow disappeared.