The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

by Annie Jones

  Because the Bernadettes of the world—and there aren’t nearly enough of them around, to my way of thinking—understand that the time to give up on another one of God’s children is never.

  Chapter Five

  Appearances. It’s said they can be deceiving. Obviously, I agree. Chloe, it now seemed, might be more intimidated than intimidating. Sammy might be more snake than charmer. Maxine, who is the one always pushing me to get us a pair of sparkly tiaras, wants all the trappings of being a Queen Mama/Rescuer of Girls Who Just Need a Small Nudge to Find Happiness but is less excited about taking on the responsibilities. And Bernadette just might have a little wildcat underneath that mousy exterior of hers.

  Then there’s Jan Belmont.

  If ever there was a woman ruled by the deception of appearances, Jan was it. Cool, collected, in control. That’s what she wanted everyone to see when they looked at her. And then she wanted them to make the next step in the old adage, “Seeing is believing.” She wanted everyone to believe it. She did not just hope for this, she relied upon it, as sure as Maxine and I rely upon the goodness of the Lord.

  It was her husband, she wanted everyone who looked upon her situation to construe, who was the needy one, the helpless one, the wounded one. And over the past year, he had worn the casts and contraptions and carried not one but two canes to show everyone the extent of his brokenness. Her? She was fine.

  No one bought that, of course. But then again, no one had reason or the means to challenge it. Until this morning.

  This same morning, when I had made up my mind to no longer allow myself to think I know anything about a person based on outward appearances, Jan Belmont chose to put me to the test by sitting all by herself on a rooftop—a universal distress call, make no mistake about it.

  “I’ll drive.” Bernadette had said it in a way that left no room for argument. And what would anyone have said to dissuade her anyway?

  Me? No, let me take my truck. Y’all don’t mind riding in the open truck bed, do ya?

  Or Jake? Hey, let’s all pile into my junk heap and see how many it can hold without the doors actually falling off and sending half of us flying out into the street the first time we hit a bump.

  Why not Sammy? Why don’t I untether this hot-air balloon and show you what this baby can really do?

  That’s how it happened that we pulled into the Belmonts’ drive way in a big white van with silver wedding bells and At Your Service painted on the side. And out we came, like clowns spilling into the center ring, me and Maxine, the gangly but gallant minister, the suddenly take-charge Bernadette and the little girl in the twirly skirt over a pair of jeans and orange-streaked hair. I don’t know why Mr. Belmont didn’t rush right out to welcome us, maybe even invite us into his home and offer to make us cold lemonade and hot pigs in a blanket.

  “What’s he doing?” Jake asked, focusing on the man in a rumpled pajama top and baggy sweatpants staring blankly out the big picture window in the front of the white circa-1970s split-level house.

  “He gives me the creeps,” Chloe whispered, and considering the source, we all took that comment seriously.

  “Jan must be around on the back side of the house. That’s the direction of the drive-in.” Bernadette pointed. Then she bobbed her head and shifted around in a way that made me think she was actually trying to see the flea market grounds from there. “We wouldn’t have been able to see her from over there if she’d been sitting in the front—I mean, on the front of the house.”

  “But her neighbors would.” That was Maxine’s way of agreeing with Bernadette. Jan would be unhappy enough to know we had spotted her. She sure would never have exposed even this hint of odd behavior, of potential weakness, to the whole neighborhood.

  Maxine clearly did not think I shared that trait—the unwillingness to act like a big nut in front of everyone—because she shoved me to the front of the group and said, “Go up there, Odessa, and ring the bell. See if he’ll talk to you.”

  “Me? Why me?” Even though the Belmonts had been members of our church, or, to put it more humbly, David had been pastor of their church, for many years, I honestly could not see why I should be the one to confront Morty Belmont in his own home. And in his pajama top, no less.

  Despite the size of my personality and sometimes my hair—which can both be a bit too big, even by Texas standards—in certain situations I become downright Charlie Brownish. You know, like I think I have the plainest, roundest face in the crowd and absolutely nobody will have any idea who I am.

  This happens, for example, when I meet somebody who knows me from church, on their turf instead of mine. I’m just sure they won’t know me. Even though if they were to see me in my proper place, standing next to David, flashing a humongous smile, shaking hands and asking about their mama, their business or their vacation plans, my name would spring instantly to their lips. They’d even be able to dredge up a few small-talk comments about my two sons and what they are up to away at college. But me turning up in a man’s own driveway with this crowd in tow?

  It’s an entirely out-of-context experience.

  “Go.” Maxine prodded. I mean, literally prodded.

  “I will thank you not to jab me in the ribs again with your bony old fingers,” I snapped.

  You should be thankful that I don’t have an umbrella, Sister Pepperdine, or you’d know what jabbing feels like,” she warned, not the least bit serious about the threat to poke me into action with the business tip of an umbrella. “Now, poor Jan is sitting up on her roof and her husband is…Well, look at the man, girl. He’s standing at the window, but the man is clearly ‘not home.’” She made quotation marks in the air. “Someone has got to intervene here.”

  Someone, I thought, my stomach knotting up like silk fringe sent through the spin cycle. But why me?

  “Maybe we should call David.” That was my instincts talking. I learned early on in my career as a minister’s wife not to overstep my bounds, or I would hear about it.

  Hearing about things. Now that was its own peculiar problem, too. What if I went up there and the man babbled out something I couldn’t understand? Or, worse, something I didn’t want to hear? What if he started to cry? He looked like a man who cried often and without much provocation.

  Or what if he refused to come to the door at all and just kept standing there staring?

  What if he came to the door, spoke clearly and innocently enough, didn’t shed a tear…but he stank?

  My nose twitched. I started mentally thumbing through Bible verses about dealing with lepers and the lame and even demons, but I couldn’t find a single one about how to go about showing Christian love to stinky people. Should we hold our breath? Offer them soap? Always carry a spray can of air freshener?

  Of course, I didn’t really need a verse to guide me about how to love the person while hating his odor. This was just the kind of nonsense that was going through my mind as I tried to get up the courage to do what Jesus would have done…or find a plausible excuse to get out of it.

  “Maybe we should just go around to the back of the house,” Bernadette suggested.

  “And do what?” Maxine laid her hand gently on Bernadette’s shoulder. When she spoke, her question sounded as soft as her touch looked. “Shall we shout at Mrs. Belmont? Shall we make a scene and have everyone look from their windows to find her out there and us trying to coax her to come down like some wayward kitten?”

  “I don’t think anyone thinks of Mrs. Belmont as a kitten,” Chloe muttered.

  Maxine poked me in the back a second time and said, “Go up and ring that bell, Odessa. Ask the man to let us go upstairs and see if we can talk to Jan.”

  “I’ll go,” Jake said, taking a long stride forward.

  I sighed in relief, but deep down, I felt anything but relieved. Was this what I really wanted? Was this the real Odessa Pepperdine, who talked a good game but then, when it came down to it, did not have the nerve to ride in a tethered balloon or even walk up to the
door of a member of her own church family? Suddenly I wondered if my hairdresser, when throwing that white streak in my hair, hadn’t been trying to make my outsides match my insides. Odessa Pepperdine, coward. Or skunk.

  I didn’t like the implication of either one. No, not one bit. How could I have not seen it before this instant? If I couldn’t meet this small, everyday challenge, then I didn’t deserve to chair a committee, much less claim that I was willing to make myself part of God’s plan for someone else’s life, as I had with Bernadette.

  “No, I should go.” And just like that, with my lips still rounded to speak the word go, I took off up the sidewalk that led to the steps that led to…me stopping cold in my tracks.

  “What are you waiting for? One of us to whip out a little toy trumpet and go…” Maxine formed a circle with her thumb and forefinger, pressed it to her lips and sounded out a fanfare.

  “Charge!” Chloe thrust her arm in the air. When she looked around and saw that no one else had joined her, she lowered it again, more than a bit sheepishly.

  And in those few sweet gestures, the girl got to me, endeared herself to me entirely, and I smiled. She really did want to be a part of this, or at least a part of something larger than herself. Bigger than the flea market. Better than her relationship with Sammy the belligerent balloon ballyhooer. She didn’t look the type at all, but this girl was something I was not—brave. She had not just come along on a mission to help a woman she knew would reject her out of hand, but had done it by joining a lot of old fuddy-duddies. (Do they still use that word? I don’t care if they don’t, it fits us right down to a T and I don’t want to imagine what other words kids might use these days to describe a bunch of over-the-hill-ish do-gooders.) She had come knowing that we were all Christians and that we suspected she was anything but a member of our faith. Brave girl. And bravery like that had to be rewarded.

  It was that feeling of goodwill and good humor that enabled me to take those steps and cheerfully knock on the Belmonts’ door.

  No answer.

  Well, the man had suffered a terrible accident. You couldn’t expect him to up and bound over to the door. I knocked again.

  Still nothing.

  I drew a deep breath and turned my head, not to peer into the window a few feet away, but to check the expressions of my companions, who were still standing by the van in the driveway. “Is he still just standing there?” I mouthed, and threw in a jerk of my thumb to indicate poor Morty.

  Everyone nodded. All at once, you know, like those joke videos they make of cats watching Ping-Pong.

  “‘Ask, and it shall be given you,’” Maxine urged, using the familiar verse from Matthew 7:7.

  “Hello? Mr. Belmont? Um, Morty? Can we talk?”

  “‘Seek, and you shall find.’” Jake picked up in the verse where Maxine had left off.

  I leaned over, peeked into the window, then motioned toward the door. Mr. Belmont’s seemingly unseeing gaze bore down on me.

  “‘Knock, and it shall be opened,’” Maxine finished up.

  “I did knock,” I protested.

  “Is the door open?” she asked.

  I held my breath. It couldn’t be that easy. “I couldn’t just try the knob and stick my head in, could I?”

  Maxine cocked her hip. If she had had that umbrella, I think she might have waggled it around like a fencing sword to help make her point. “Honey, at this point you’ve already stuck your nose in. Might as well go for the whole head.”

  Jake laughed.

  Bernadette gave me a look that dared me to challenge Maxine’s statement.

  So I did it.

  Yes, me, who was raised far better than this. I seized the doorknob of somebody else’s home, turned it, opened their door and walked right in.

  In all the years we had shared Christian fellowship, I had never been in the Belmonts’ home. And yet it looked exactly the way I would have expected it to look. Flawless. Nothing fussy or fluffy or fur-bearing in sight. Cool tones of pale aqua and white accented with gleaming unadorned silver. Silver candlesticks on the mantel. Sleek silver-encased photos that looked so perfect, it made me wonder if she had hidden her real family’s pictures behind the ones of professional models that came with the frame. A silver tray crowded with medicine bottles, and an empty glass rested on the coffee table.

  A place for everything, and everything in its place. Except the two occupants of the home, of course. I looked at Morty at last, and that’s when I noticed the oversize brown recliner behind him. Definitely out of place. As was the man standing there, his hand curled around a TV remote, his face unshaven and his hair uncombed.

  Poor man. He looked as out of place here as Jan must have sitting on the roof. I blinked, and tears bathed my eyes. My nose tingled. There was a reason I didn’t do this kind of thing, I realized then. It wasn’t because of my personality or my fear of foul odors. It was because…I’m just not any good at it. I’m too tenderhearted. Too empathetic. Too prone to dramatics and blowing things out of proportion and blubbering like a baby over situations that touch my heart and make me just want to—

  “Get out!”

  “Jan!” Gulp. Honestly, I think I actually made a big gulping sound. It’s understandable, when you take a woman on the verge of busting out blubbering and scare her half out of her wits by storming into a room where she…where she, meaning me, has no business being in the first place. Which was why, as soon as I realized how it all must look to Jan, I started trying to explain myself as fast as my tongue could tattle. “I…Morty was standing there. They said somebody has to go up there and knock and the door shall be opened and the door was open, and everyone said, stick your head in…just like cats watching Ping-Pong. And we couldn’t go around back and holler, even though you were on the roof and—”

  “Stop!” She threw up her hands. She scowled, and not just her regular everyday scowl, either. This one looked like maybe I had given her a first-class headache with all my blathering. Finally, rubbing her temple with one hand, she made a “Go back” motion in the air with the other one and said, “How did you know that? About me being on the roof?”

  “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 soo
n 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?”