The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas Read online

  Praise for Annie Jones and her novels

  “Jones beautifully conveys a range of emotions, from the depth of despair to the pinnacle of joy…. Readers will nod their heads with empathy toward characters who seem like real people. Throughout the novel, compassion and family bonds bring hope, and God’s love is shown to shine through even the darkest of circumstances.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Sadie-in-Waiting

  “Annie Jones writes about characters we all know and—despite their quirks—love. Sadie Pickett is an endearing character whose foibles and charms will leave you smiling as you think, Yes, life is just like that. Carry on, Sadie, and thanks for inviting us along for the ride!”

  —Angela Hunt, Christy Award-winning author of A Time to Mend on Sadie-in-Waiting

  “Annie Jones has a proven ability to bring to life characters with whom we can identify, and whose trials and triumphs become our own.”

  —Hannah Alexander, Christy Award-winning author of Grave Risk

  “Jones adds a touch of humor to realistically depict the emotions that most moms feel on a regular basis. Hannah’s struggles are down-to-earth and will touch hearts.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Mom over Miami

  “Annie Jones is a true champion of stressed-out moms everywhere, and her understanding of what being a mother entails can only have come from someone who has lived it herself. Every mother who has ever felt like packing her bags and running far away from home has to read this book! Mom over Miami is realistically funny…. Annie Jones is quickly becoming one of my very favorite authors, and I cannot wait until her next book comes out.”

  —Romancejunkies.com

  The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

  ANNIE JONES

  To the Clear Creek Writers of Shelby County—Norm, Gail, Chip, Rob, Gary, Mary Lou, Stephanie, Tachelle, Joan, Bill, Thelma, Kate (and Alexandra) and Clarence. Did I leave anyone out? Also, Betsy. You are all such talented writers and wonderful friends. Thank you for the inspiration.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter One (Really, we mean it this time)

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Questions for Discussion

  Chapter One

  “Sisters, girlfriends and troublemakers—you know who you are—you are fearfully and wonderfully made! In other words, God doesn’t make junk. Thankfully, his children do, and that’s why we have been blessed with flea markets just about everywhere.”

  “The queen has spoken!”

  “My name is Odessa Pepperdine, and I am not just some silver-haired small-town queen bee, my dears. I am the Queen Mama of all queen bees in the sweet little hive of friends I have made among the shoppers and shopkeepers at the Castlerock, Texas, Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market. And it was on my say-so that we titled this little bit here Chapter One.”

  “Even though, you’ll soon discover, the real Chapter One doesn’t actually get started in earnest for a few more paragraphs.”

  “That’s Maxine Cooke-Nash, my sister in Christ and formerly—”

  “Stranger in the community. That’s what Odessa always says about us. ‘Sisters in Christ, strangers in the community.’ We grew up living parallel lives on opposite sides of the proverbial tracks.”

  “What tracks?”

  “I said proverbial. You know, just my delicate way of letting folks know that we stuck to opposite sides of town, you keeping company with people from your church, and me staying mostly inside the African-American community.”

  “Only back then, when we were young, they didn’t use that term, African-American.”

  “Oh, no, they didn’t.”

  “They say you can never describe things in terms of black and white, but Maxine and I can tell you, if you were coming up in Castlerock in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties you could.”

  “Amen, Odessa, Amen.”

  “And coming up back then, Maxine and I were both active in the Campfire Girls, then went on to play high school basketball—probably against one another more than once. Later we each graduated top of our classes at Christian colleges, married ministers and settled down to raise our children, all within a few miles of one another. And we never met until we both tried to buy the same thing at the flea market.”

  “Are we telling this part now?”

  “Oh. Oh, no. No, actually, we really do have something in mind in starting out things this way. As I said, I’m Odessa and this is Maxine. Say hello properly, Maxine.”

  “Hi, y’all. Don’t mind me. I may not say much, especially when Odessa is holding forth—and let’s be up front, when is she not holding forth or holding court or holding just about anything except back?”

  “Ahem.”

  “Anyway, I may not say much, but when I do speak up, I try to make it about something worthy of the effort.”

  “And she does. She certainly does. Take what she had to say about the way I wanted to begin to tell the story about what happened when…well, there I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Which she does, and I have to rein her in.”

  “We’re a good team like that, aren’t we, Maxine?”

  “Yes, we are. In fact, when it comes to reining in Odessa, I’m just about the only one who can anymore.”

  “Before…well, before all the things between the pages of this book happened, I never needed reining in. I was raised to be seen and not heard. Encouraged to be a good little minister’s wife in the way of ninja-style church ladies everywhere, who appear when they are needed and disappear into the wood-paneled walls of the church basement when their service is not required.”

  “I cannot feature that, Odessa.”

  “Of course you can’t, because now I am what people like to call ‘irrepressible.’”

  I’ve heard other words used to describe you, Miz Pepperdine.”

  “Oh, Maxine, you crack me up.”

  “Likewise, Odessa honey.”

  “See, we get each other. We speak the same language, you might say. Though we did not start out on the best of speaking terms at all. Oh, there now, that reminds me! I was explaining about the way we decided to start our story out.”

  “How?”

  “You know, with Chapter One, the way you said. Uh, oh, let me tell this right. Maxine said that whenever she sees a big bold heading like Foreword or A Word from the Author or sometimes even Prologue, she tends to just skim right over it.”

  “I do. I’m sorry. But I think reading a book is a lot like eating a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich—”

  “Which is her favorite.”

  “Which is my favorite.”

  “My favorite used to be a nice simple chicken salad, but I like my food with a bolder flavor these days.”

  “Odessa’s chicken-salad days are behind her.”

  “Ever since I finally got fed up enough to throw good taste out the window!”

  “Odessa, she likes to come up with a catch phrase for just about everything that happens to her.”

  “And, oh, what happened to me at the flea market when…No. No, that’s not what we were talking about. What was it, Maxine? Your love of a good BLT?”

  “My love of a
good book, actually, by way of my favorite sandwich. See, often I think reading a book is a lot like a bacon and lettuce and tomato sandwich on toast served up on my favorite lunch platter with chips and a pickle on the side. Done right, it all looks so good, but I am anxious to sink my teeth in and get to the meat of it.”

  “But the meat of a book to one person might be nothing more than the olive stuck on a toothpick to hold the thing together to someone else, Maxine. So a book is not a sandwich.”

  “Well, a case could be made for that metaphor, Odessa. You know, with all the layers of story and setting and themes and—”

  “No. I absolutely reject that analogy. If you have to compare a book to something edible and layered, you’d have to go with a hand-dipped chocolate truffle.”

  “Sandwich.”

  “Trrruffle, Maxine.”

  “One woman’s chocolate is another woman’s BLT. Now clink coffee cups with me, so we can be in agreement and move on.”

  Clink.

  “Anyway, when Maxine and I began this—”

  “Ages and pages ago.”

  “Mumbling is not very agreeable, Maxine.”

  “Point taken.”

  Clink.

  “We, Maxine and I, began this as Chapter One because we are both ladies of a certain age who were brought up right.”

  “That dictates that we take a minute to introduce ourselves before we launch into our story.”

  “I mean, really, I wouldn’t just walk up to a total stranger in the library and shout, ‘Call me Ishmael’ or ‘Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful.’ Would you, Maxine?”

  “No, I would not. At least not without offering them my hand, giving them my name and telling them why I wanted to say what I had to say.”

  “That’s just good manners.”

  “Good manners.”

  “And if Maxine and I are about anything, it’s good manners.”

  “And using them to get our way.”

  Clink.

  “Which is why you’ll understand and hopefully forgive us that we stuck Chapter One on this part that might normally have said, you know, Foreword or Prologue.”

  “Which is the part I usually skim over.”

  “And Maxine and I? Let me tell you, we are not women to be skimmed over!”

  “Not anymore!”

  “No. Not anymore. Our days of being skimmed over are past us. We put in our time as mild-mannered ministers’ wives, and now have come the days of speaking our minds and acting on the desires of our hearts!”

  “We were mild mannered, not our husbands. Just so there’s no confusion. Because at this point, you might find it hard to think of either Odessa or me as ever having been the kind most likely to inherit the Earth.”

  “She means meek, for those of you who might not have picked up the Bible reference.”

  “See? We really are minister’s wives.”

  “Though not mild-mannered ministers, though they are both darling men in their own rights.”

  “Oh, yes. Precious men. Smart and funny and Godly, both of them, through and through.”

  “And manly.”

  “Manly, Maxine?”

  “Yes, well, I called them darling and you called them precious, and non-Texan types might take that to mean unmanly, which they are not, not one bit.”

  “No, they are men, through and through.”

  “Which is why, once they retired, Odessa and I started going to the flea market, to escape from—”

  “To find respite.”

  “To find respite for a few hours each week from our retired hubbies.”

  “Oh, and to try to collect for ourselves the one thing we each wanted with all our worldly beings.”

  “Ever since we were each young—and I do mean young—brides in the nineteen-sixties.”

  “The entire twenty-piece line of chip-proof kitchenware made by the Royal Service Company of Akron, Ohio, the black-and-gold-on-white Hostess Queen pattern.”

  Clink.

  “Anyway, we just wanted to introduce ourselves up front and let you know a little something about ourselves and this BLT of a story…”

  “Truffle.”

  “…that we have to share, and why we have to share it.”

  “You see, Maxine and me, we weren’t always Queen Mamas.”

  “No, we were not.”

  “Or queen bees.”

  “Worker bees, more like it.”

  “Regular drones.”

  “Which isn’t a bad thing, now, but…”

  “But the time comes when even a drone has to stop and look around herself and say, ‘It’s time to create a buzz.’”

  “And oh, what a buzz Odessa made!”

  “I did. Though I didn’t do it just for myself. I did it for all of us.”

  “The drones.”

  “The meek.”

  “The women who are strangers in their own communities.”

  “Who are all wonderfully and fearfully made.”

  Clink.

  “There’s the meat of the story, Maxine, right there.”

  “Shh. You’re getting ahead again, when all we wanted to do with this introduction part—That’s what we could have called it, the Introduction.”

  “And you’re telling me you wouldn’t have skimmed something called the Introduction?”

  “Well, no…I am a skimmer, I do confess.”

  “Right. And if we got other skimmers in the crowd, and they went into the story, and suddenly you or I popped in with a comment…”

  “Probably you.”

  “It might throw things off. Say, Maxine, have you ever heard that expression a month of Sundays?”

  “What now, Odessa?”

  “I was just thinking how the story of when we first all got thrown together until the incident was just about a month—of flea markets.”

  “You mean the span of four flea markets?”

  “No, I mean…let me see, from July Fourth until Labor Day, weekly flea markets, lasting three days—except we never come out on Sundays, being as that’s the Lord’s Day—but you can count it because some things happened on Sundays. So that means…”

  “Hold on, Odessa is trying to do the math in her head. This could take a minute. I’d tell you to go read a book, but I’m sort of hoping you already are!”

  “Got it. Three days a week over about nine weeks, plus extra for Labor Day weekend, makes twenty-eight days, so that’s right. About a month of flea markets from start to finish to tell the story of how our new friends Jan, Bernadette and Chloe—”

  “Ahem.”

  “Oh, right, don’t want to give too much away.”

  “Let’s just say it involves some collectible kitsch and some baked goods.”

  “Oh, and don’t forget to mention—”

  “The tiaras. The story is just jam-packed with tiaras.”

  “Hey, a woman wears a lot of hats in her lifetime. Why shouldn’t one of them be a crown?”

  Clink.

  “And also a hot-air balloon.”

  “I got nothing for that one. So I’ll see y’all on the next page, as I intend to start off and probably wrap up every chapter from here on out. Just my way of keeping things on track, you know.”

  “Odessa means just her way of being the big queen boss of all things, even your reading pleasure.”

  “Please note that Maxine wore the sweetest, warmest smile ever as she said that.”

  “I did. You know, it’s always enjoyable to watch people doing the things that they are best at doing, and our Odessa, she is the very best at being the boss. So that’s the way it’s going to be. Me and Odessa having our say as we—and by we I mean mostly Odessa—see fit. God bless, and enjoy!”

  “And don’t forget…”

  “Stay Queenly!”

  Chapter One

  (Really, we mean it this time)

  The 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 o
f 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 aflight?

  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.