The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas Read online

  “Hot-air balloon rides! Tethered for your complete safety.” The paper rattled in his hand. The wind picked up his shaggy brown hair and pressed it against his pale and slightly blemished skin. He hunched his narrow shoulders and grinned right at me. “All major credit cards accepted.”

  “No, don’t waste good paper on a bad prospect, young man.” Maxine pushed back his hand, and the bright yellow flyer he had in it. “Choose your battles, the Reverend Nash would tell you. It would take an army to get me up in one of those contraptions.”

  I stopped, because I always stopped to fuss over young men who think they can charm me into doing the improbable. I’m a sucker for charm in all its forms, and I could tell that this young man, despite looking like he had gotten dressed from someone else’s dirty-clothes hamper this morning, fairly brimmed over with the stuff. I shook my head at him, smiling. “In what wild flight of imagination can you actually picture us two granny-ladies, loaded down with all manner of vintage jewelry and sporting fanny packs over floral jersey sundresses, hoisting ourselves up into a big ol’basket? Let alone allowing you to launch us heavenward under a canopy of…whatever fabric that is up there sporting an advertisement for the King of Beers?”

  “Aw, that logo isn’t permanent. The boss switches it every few weeks,” he said, as if that might just change our minds about the prospect.

  It didn’t.

  “I don’t care if you tack on a banner lauding the King of Kings—and you wouldn’t do so bad to think about that, because wherever the Lord goes, He draws a crowd.” Maxine paused for a minute so he could let that sink in, then scowled. “But no matter what you advertise, it won’t help draw me into that contraption.”

  “Me, either,” I told the young man, sounding a little less decisive than my friend. “Not at this point in my life.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Ms. Pepperdine.” He looked right at me and said my name. I’m not sure how he knew my name, but then, loads of people that I had never actually been formally introduced to knew me through the church and my many local activities. Still, it always surprises me when somebody uses my name and I don’t know them. I took a step back.

  “Don’t write off the balloon ride just because you’re a grandma.” He took a step toward me. Guess he had sized up Maxine as a lost cause already, but clearly he had high hopes for me. “There’s still a lot of fire in you.”

  “Still?” From ripe to rotten, in a single word. Still? That’s the kind of word folks tacked on at the flea market when they wanted to convince someone to pay too much for an object that had long since lost its usefulness. Still hinted that I might have some doubt myself as to the depths of the well of my vitality. Still, indeed. “Did you just say I still have a lot of fire in me, son?”

  “Oh, you’ve done it now,” Maxine said. And she laughed a bit as she said it, too.

  “Yeah, still. Is there…something wrong with that?” He cocked his head, his expression bright with an innocence that could not conceal the glint of mischief in his smiling eyes.

  “Well, just you listen to that same sentence without the word still and see what you think.” I would have pushed up my sleeves, had I been wearing any, and maybe flicked my wrist and done a little flourish, the way a magician does right before he pulls that rabbit out of his hat. “‘There’s still a lot of fire in you, Ms. Pepperdine.’”

  He nodded to show he’d tried it on for size and found it fitting.

  “Or…” This time I did waggle my hands about a bit, and narrowed one eye, trying to look mysterious, sultry and clever, or at the very least impish. I wet my lips and affected a low, playful tone. “Ms. Pepperdine, you have a lot of fire in you.”

  His eyes got big for a moment, then his smile grew wide. He bobbed his head. “I get it.”

  “I thought you might.”

  He nodded again, only this time he shot me a look, all coy and crafty and just darling in its ill-disguised artlessness. He winked and added, without so much as a snicker, “When I say you have got a lot of fire in you, that means you’ve never stopped being a hot babe.”

  Charm. Gets me every time.

  “You’re my witness, Maxine. That adorable young man called me a hot babe.” I licked the tip of my thumb, pressed it to my shoulder and hissed like bacon sizzling in a hot skillet.

  “More like a hot-flash babe.” She licked her own thumb, stuck it to my shoulder and made a pffftt sound—more fizzle than sizzle.

  We both laughed.

  My young salesman did not. Wise kid for his age. “I bet if you ever tried going up in the balloon you’d love it, Ms. Pepperdine. You too, Ms. Nash.”

  “That’s Cooke-Nash, son,” I put in real quick. Wise and educated are not the same thing, but I knew he’d never make that mistake again. “Maxine is one of the original liberated women who kept her maiden name and hyphenated it with that of her darling husband, the good Reverend.”

  “Cool.” He gave her an appreciative nod, even though both Maxine and I knew once-controversial issues like women keeping their names didn’t even register in his realm of reality.

  “Honey, you are wasting your breath talking to me, no matter what name you use to do it.” Maxine waved her hand and her impressive collection of 1930s polka-dot Bakelite bracelets clattered down her forearm. “There’s not enough hot air in all of Texas…”

  “A state famous as one of the world’s leading producers of hot air,” I hurried to add.

  “…to get me up in one of those things.” She looked at the fellow over the top of her pink-opalescent reading glasses—you know, the kind you get at a nice lady’s boutique, not the kind you pick up at some discount place with mart in the name. Très cute, I tell you.

  I’m not the only still-hot babe in this duo, after all. And us hot babes, even when we have to have help to read the fine print or see the marks on the underside of ceramic poodle statues, we want to do it in style.

  So after Maxine gave him that look, she put her hand on her, um, ample hip. She looked toward the rainbow-striped balloon billowing along the ground in front of the old towering concrete screen with the words Satellite Vista Drive-In Theatre painted on it. She tsked and shook her head. “Not enough hot air in all of Texas.”

  He took it well. It’s hard not to take things well from Maxine, even rejection. She has that kind of face, dimpled and motherly. Her skin is dark, of course, but not so dark that you can’t see the smattering of freckles over the bridge of her nose.

  Now I ask you, how can you get your feelings hurt by someone with freckles on her nose? And a sweet, soft voice that meanders out of an ever-present smile in a slow Texas drawl?

  So he took her refusal in good spirits.

  Now, me…? Well, at this point in my life, I guess I looked an easy mark. I certainly must have looked one to that hairdresser who put a wild white streak in the front of my usually dignified silver hair. Tarnished silver. Okay, silver plate, worn thin and discolored. Which is why I got myself to the chichi-est salon in all of Castlerock for a new color and do and how I ended up platinum-blond with what the staff there called “chunky highlights” of almost pure white. If my husband, David, hadn’t liked it so much, I’d have headed for the drugstore posthaste for a bottle of hair rinse and a floppy sun hat.

  Anyway, either my hair or my demeanor or something else about me screamed easy mark to the balloon-ballyhooing charmer, or that young man knew something about me that even I didn’t know.

  “I can tell, Ms. Pepperdine, you want to cut loose.”

  “I do?”

  “Now that’s a scary thought.” Maxine turned her over-the-glasses glare on me.

  “You’re just itchin’ to have an adventure.” He pushed the piece of paper in his hand toward me.

  “Me?” The page crackled in my hand. “Itching?”

  “It’s all the peroxide they used in her hair. Gave her a rash,” Maxine teased.

  The kid ignored her, which was exactly the proper thing to do after a remark like th
at. Then he fixed his winning smile on me—also not a bad choice. “You, Ms. Pepperdine, want to break free from the things that tie you down here. You want to rise up.”

  “Up?”

  “Yes, up.”

  My eyes followed the line of his hand high into the air over my head.

  “Up above this crowd.” He waved his fliers over my head.

  “Me? Above this crowd?” I could almost feel my feet lifting. My heart beat a little faster. I gazed skyward and swallowed hard. I could just about…

  “Get a life.”

  A woman’s voice broke through my thoughts and brought me rocketing hard back down to earth.

  “You’d think they were giving away gold in there, the way y’all flock around the gate here,” she said, a little too loud to be mistaken for talking to herself and yet not aiming her criticism at anyone in particular. “It’s nothing short of a fire hazard. I can’t believe anyone would be in such an all-fired hurry to be the first one to have a chance to buy somebody else’s tacky trash. Is that the best thing you can think to do with your time?”

  I sighed and gave the young man a gentle pat on the back. “Son, I think you’ve read me all wrong. I’m a lady. And a minister’s wife for more than half my life. It’s just not in me to ever, ever, ever put myself above anybody.”

  “It’s just a few feet.” He pointed again.

  I didn’t look. The unseen complaining woman was right. I had better things to do with my time and my money than to waste it on such a personal indulgence. “No, but I do thank you for thinking I might actually try it.”

  “If it’s the money you’re worried about, we do take all major credit cards,” he called, and it seemed to me his voice carried a bit too much urgency.

  “Oh, I would never bring a credit card out here, sugar,” I said as I hustled along after Maxine, giving him a wave over my shoulder. My collection of bracelets—charm, of course—jangled like dozens of tiny dented bells. “Maybe you should look for someone who wasn’t raised right and doesn’t mind looking down on his or her fellow man now and again.”

  But the young man had vanished. Just like that. Disappeared into the crowd without a backward glance. “After all that time invested in getting me to just think about that ride, he sure did write me off awfully fast when I said I didn’t have a credit card.”

  “Maybe you look like you don’t carry enough cash on you to pay for the thing outright so he gave up,” Maxine suggested.

  “Hmm.” Something about it all didn’t ring true—except the not-carrying-too-much-cash part. I keep to my budget. A lifetime of good stewardship, prodded along by the ever-watchful eyes of certain members of David’s—that’s my husband David Samuel Pepperdine—of David’s congregation saw to that. Trust me, I learned early that if I indulged in some extravagance, even something as small as a hat that I shouldn’t have worn to church service, David would hear about it.

  Maxine and I hadn’t walked on far enough to get gravel dust on our favorite flea market footwear—nurses’ shoes, if you must know; think about it, it makes perfect sense, being on our feet all day out here and all—when that precious young man took my advice about moving on to someone who didn’t mind looking down on others.

  “Hot-air balloon rides! Tethered for your complete safety!”

  “Are you crazy?” The harsh voice was only a few footfalls in back of us now. “After what happened to my husband?”

  Maxine yanked on my elbow to keep me from stepping into a puddle.

  “Jan Belmont,” she whispered. Even before I could whip my head around to gape, she tacked on, “Don’t look!”

  But I had to look.

  Jan was that kind of person. The kind you didn’t want to screech to a halt and stand and stare at but couldn’t help it. How do they describe that inclination? Like looking at a train wreck?

  Few people would describe the perfectly pulled-together former cheerleader—and this being Texas, that’s not the kind of laurel that fades with time—as a wreck of any kind. But more than one poor soul who had gotten in her way certainly knew what it was like to be run over by a fully stoked locomotive.

  Jan stopped. Well, her feet stopped any forward motion. Then she sort of juggled everything in her arms, without actually tossing anything up in the air. Although that would have been worth more than the price of the hot-air-balloon ticket to see, given that she had a sheet cake and four plastic containers of assorted baked goods to drop off for our church charity booth.

  Anyway, she stopped walking just long enough to nail this poor young fellow with a spine-shriveling glare. Then she said, in a way only a woman like Jan—bless her heart—can pull off, “I’ve seen what becomes of a body that falls from even that short of a distance, thank you. And because of that, I have neither the inclination—or, frankly, the financial freedom—to take that kind of risk.”

  The young man’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He stepped back. “No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am. I understand.”

  “I thought you might.” She smiled in such a way that it looked as if it actually pained her to lift the corners of her mouth. Then she stormed forward, people getting out of her way as she went. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”

  Maxine pulled on my elbow again, and I slipped out of Jan’s path.

  Seconds later her monster-expensive—meaning the price of those things was more frightening than sitting through a scary monster movie—athletic shoe went plunging square into the puddle I had narrowly avoided.

  Water splashed up, onto her skirt and legs.

  She shut her eyes.

  Someone else might have let out with a string of curse words.

  Jan just gritted her teeth and announced, “This place is a pigsty. And I hate every second of the few minutes a week I am forced to spend here doing God’s work.”

  Jan Belmont was indeed a malcontent. But then, life had not handed her much to feel contented about these past eight months. There’d been talk of trouble in the marriage, and of her not taking it well when both her children went to swanky East Coast colleges and hardly ever returned to visit. Then her husband had had what folks in town solemnly called “the accident,” in that tone that made you wonder if it actually wasn’t. An accident, that is. Whatever it was, it required a lengthy recovery period, with no return to good health in sight to date. The financial strain alone had altered the course of her life in ways that no one could really grasp, especially with Jan trying so hard to pretend everything was fine. Right or wrong, the burden of that pretense would have crippled most other people.

  “I can’t help but feel sorry for her,” I whispered to Maxine.

  “I hate this dirty people-blocking-the-aisles-devouring-corn-dogs-and-tossing-the-gnawed-on-sticks-on-the-ground health hazard, eyesore-to-the-community pigsty. And I promise everyone within hearing distance that one day I am going to do something to see that this flea market is shut down and that monstrosity of a movie screen bulldozed to the ground!”

  “I can,” Maxine said as we both watched Jan limp along with one soggy shoe toward the vendors’ entrance. “Help it, that is. In fact, I don’t feel sorry for her one bit.”

  Yes, in Proverbs they warn us that it’s better to live in the corner of the roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome woman. I can’t help but wonder if that was what Marty Belmont had in mind—taking up residence on the roof—the day he crawled out of a second-story window of his home, fell off, broke half the bones in his body and crushed what little bit of goodwill there was left in his now ever-malcontent wife, Jan.

  Chapter Two

  (As they say in the old movies, later that same day)

  Just as heaven has its orders of angels—Seraphim and Cherubim, Thrones, Archangels and the like—churches have a hierarchy all their own.

  You have the leaders and the laymen, the servers and the silent types, the vivacious go-getters and the perpetual victims, the nitpickers and the naysayers, the ones who show up every time the door is open a
nd those you only see on Christmas and Easter. And in every church—at least every one that I have had the privilege and/or frustration to be associated with—there is a Bernadette.

  When Bernadette Alvarez named the bridal-and-formal-wear boutique she started in her one-bedroom house At Your Service, absolutely everyone—from her grandmother to the kid who delivered her first box of business cards—said the same thing about her choice.

  “Perfect!”

  I think she should have seen that as a warning.

  People, sometimes even though they are total strangers, often see things about a person that that person cannot, or refuses to, see about themselves. And when these people go to the trouble to point it out again and again in one sweet, concise, enthusiastically spoken word? Well, that pointed-out-to person? She should see it for what it is—a big ol’ red flag.

  Trouble with Bernadette was…when it came to warning flags, that girl was color-blind.

  Having listened to her talk over the months I’ve known her, I think that’s because ever since she was a child growing up in a home overflowing with family and cultural conflict, Bernadette Alvarez has tried to make everybody happy. She tried to be Texan enough for her “My forefathers died at the Alamo” mother, Gloria Perry Alvarez. But also Mexican enough to suit her first-generation-immigrant grandmother, Gallina Roja.

  “Let me—it’s Maxine again—just pop in here to emphasize that everyone in town calls that spry, ornery old woman Gallina Roja, which means ‘red hen.’”

  “They say it’s because she has red hair, even though she is no spring chicken.”

  “What Odessa is too nice to tell y’all is that we all know she got that title because she has practically pecked her daughter-in-law and granddaughter and even her precious son to death, trying to ‘improve’ their lives for them.”