The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

by Annie Jones

  “But we haven’t—”

  “Now we have.” I swung open the door and walked in.

  Maxine did not follow immediately, so I had to crane my neck to slap a steely-eyed glare on her and jerk my head to tell her to get herself inside. Maxine and I are a team, after all, and she is my backup. And when she acts like this, all stubborn and sensible, well, it surely does—get my back up, that is.

  Teeth set tight, I whispered hard and low, “Get in here. It’s a legitimate business, and we have every right to come through that door.”

  “I know. I know. But I just…I just can’t help thinking…a tattoo parlor?” She bent forward so that just her head and shoulders appeared through the entrance as she said, “What kind of person comes to a tattoo parlor?”

  “Someone who wants a tattoo?” A man with his hair pulled back into a tight braid studied us from behind a freestanding counter. He was lean as a leather strap, with long, angular limbs and the saddest, scraggliest goatee I had ever seen. If one of my sons had come home sporting that pitiful sprout of facial hair, I’d have handed him a washcloth and told him it looked like he’d dribbled hot cocoa down his chin. So right off, I had kind of a warm feeling about this fellow.

  Still, if I was going to describe his demeanor, and I was, I’d have chosen the term catlike. Deep-set eyes with heavy lids. He had this cool, detached air about him that did not hide a sense of tightly coiled keenness.

  “Or maybe somebody who wants to learn about somebody who has a tattoo,” he said in a quiet, cautious tone.

  That was his way of asking us why we were here. I knew that. Maxine knew that.

  Still, she looked at me and frowned, “I’m just not sure about this place.”

  I looked around us. Actually, it didn’t look all that different from your average beauty-school-graduate shoestring-budget hair salon. Only instead of pale walls, hair products on glass shelves and posters of the latest ever-changing cuts and colors on the walls, this place had dark walls covered with examples of artwork that I assumed one might choose to have permanently applied to one’s skin. Or should that be under one’s skin?

  The atmosphere had sure gotten under Maxine’s skin, I could tell. She came on inside, though, and planted her feet in one spot. She still gave off the impression of someone about to cut and run when she shifted her weight from side to side and said, “I don’t think this is the kind of place Christians should be seen in.”

  “Really?” The man came around to the side of the waist-high counter, his long fingers trailing over the corner. “Me, I’m of the opinion that Christians should be seen anywhere there are people who need to hear the message of Christ’s love.”

  “The man has a point, Maxine.” Yes, people other than the all-knowing, all-know-it-all-ing Maxine could have a point, and furthermore, sometimes that point could put my friend right in her place, as she so often did to me. I held out my hand to him, fully aware that I was skirting the sin of pride when I smiled gratefully at him for his words to Maxine and said, “Odessa Pepperdine. And this is my sister in Christ, Maxine Cooke-Nash.”

  “I’m Abner.” He grasped my hand and gave it a firm but gentlemanly shake. You know, as though he thought if he delivered the full strength of his grip he might bruise my delicate elderly hand.

  Talk about having the pride deflated right out from under a person!

  He released my hand, stood back and gave us a subdued once-over. “So, you ladies come for a tattoo today?”

  “Us?” Maxine practically yelped in surprise.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked, my pride definitely on the up-swing again.

  “Odessa!”

  “What? I just want to know.” I’d always been curious about the kinds of things people get up to in the name of self-improvement and beauty. After all, I wasn’t immune to their allure. Hadn’t I endured my share of permanent waves? And this was back in the day when they stank worse than rotten eggs and burned your scalp like fire. And high heels! Teetering around town on tiny stilts with your five little piggies jammed into skinny little pointed toes? My feet still ache from the bunions I got back then. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the things we wore as young women, the things the catalogs advertised as foundation garments. How those double-stitched and paneled creations pinched and squeezed and cut off circulation to your extremities. All in the name of slim thighs and a flat tummy. Which I never quite achieved, anyway.

  I was no stranger to the agony of fashion. So I was understandably curious about this new fad of using one’s own skin as a canvas or a pincushion. “It just looks so painful. All that jabbing. All those needles. So I don’t think it’s so bad to ask, does it hurt?”

  “Yes.” Abner offered a faint, crooked smile, his head nodding slightly as he answered with bluntest honesty.

  “I thought it would,” I said, suddenly a wee bit happier with my fashion-battle-scar bunions.

  “But if you want to give it a try, we could start with something very small, and I promise I’d be extra gentle. I think you could tolerate it if you really wanted—”

  “Don’t you even start down that way, girl,” Maxine said to me, raising her finger like some scolding schoolmarm. “This isn’t going bumpity-bump down a Dumpster-lined street or hitching a ride in a hot-air balloon.”

  That made Abner blink, and I think he looked at me with a newfound respect.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I don’t think we’ll be taking you up on the tattoo offer just now.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “We’re looking for Chloe Morgan.”

  “You cops?”

  “Us?”

  “That’s not an answer. If you’re cops and I ask, you have to give me a real answer. That’s the law.”

  I didn’t know whether to be concerned that the man knew that or curious because I didn’t. Either way, we weren’t cops, so I told him that, then brought him back to the reason for our visit. “Like I said, we’re looking for Chloe Morgan.”

  He hesitated, then cast his eyes downward, like a man laying down a heavy burden. “She doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “Why not?” I blurted the question out without thinking. Clearly, the man was not happy about Chloe leaving, and I had jumped on him as if he’d said he’d personally kicked her to the curb with a steel-toed army boot. I took a deep breath. “But she did work here? I mean recently, right?”

  She hadn’t lied about that, I hoped. Bernadette had come up with this place for us to find Chloe via her mother, who, unlike me, had asked the members of her subcommittee to write down all their contact information, home numbers, cell numbers, work numbers. And now, to learn that information was wrong? Had Chloe lied? Was any of this a sign that she was in deeper trouble than I suspected?

  “Yeah, she worked here.” Abner was still playing it quite protective of our girl.

  On the one hand, I wanted to laud him for that. On the other hand, I wanted to nab him by the gold ring in his ear and twist until he told me everything he knew so that I could get right to saving Chloe from the kind of people who…who would grab someone by the body piercing and strong-arm them into cooperating. Another deep breath. “How long ago did she stop working for you?”

  “I’m not sure I should tell you that.”

  “Hey, we told you we aren’t cops,” Maxine protested. “Don’t you believe us?”

  “Of course he believes us, Maxine. What do you think, he suspects we’re actually undercover Texas Rangers?”

  He chuckled softly.

  “Maybe.” Maxine gave a considered display of pride herself. Why shouldn’t someone see her as potentially a female-senior-citizen version of Dirty Harry or James Bond? Not that she saw herself or us that way, but the truth is, I don’t think Maxine likes being counted out of anything, even absurd stuff like that. “I don’t think it’s too far a stretch to see you and me as members of the thin blue line.”

  “There is nothing thin about us, Maxine. More like the plump blue-haired line
.”

  Another chuckle. We were winning him over.

  “Blue hair? I don’t think so. Not us. The only things that belong on our heads are—”

  “I know. Tiaras.” I raised my hand to receive a high five, and Maxine delivered with a smart, crisp slap.

  “You see, Mr.…Abner—” Maxine smiled that sassy freckle-nosed smile of hers and raised her chin like a true woman of regal bearing “—we are members of a very special order.”

  He quirked one eyebrow higher than the other, which gave him less of a catlike quality and, coupled with his crooked smile, made him look like a lop-eared pup. “Oh?”

  “The sisterhood of the Queen Mamas.” I gave a flourish with one hand.

  He shook his head, his crooked lips almost forming an actual smile at last. “You got ID?”

  “Do we look like we need ID?” Maxine put her shoulders back and her chin down.

  “Just think of us as members of the God squad. We’re here trying to help Chloe.”

  “God squad, huh?” He looked out toward the front of the place. The sunlight from the front window lit his face. It was a good face. Well traveled, but brightened from within by kindness and a sort of wisdom I suppose folks like Maxine and me will never acquire. “Just so happens I’m a member of that team myself.”

  “Who’d a thunk it,” Maxine muttered, and in her eyes I could see that she had, indeed, thunk it and she believed his words even before he spoke them

  “Yeah.” He moved his head slightly, and both Maxine and I followed his apparent line of vision to a section of the wall that displayed Celtic crosses and references to Bible verses.

  Maxine and I looked at each other.

  Finally, I stepped right up to Abner and spoke. I knew I had nothing to fear from him, and anyway, if I had really committed to allow God to use me I had to go places I would not normally go and trust people I might not normally have been open to trusting. “I think Chloe is in trouble, and we want to help.”

  “Trouble?” His narrowed his eyes. “Something to do with Sammy?”

  “Yes, Sammy certainly seems at the heart of it, to my way of thinking,” I said.

  Abner squinted even more until I could not even see the color of his pupils anymore. “That Sammy, you want to like the guy. You want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But don’t let yourself, ma’am. That Sammy is no good.”

  “Here now, if you’re on our team, you know none of us are as good as we should be,” Maxine reminded him. “That’s why we need a shepherd to help bring us home.”

  Abner blinked, and that odd angle of his lips returned. “Did you say you were a lady minister?”

  “Ministers’ wives,” she said.

  “Both of us,” I chimed in.

  “Formidable.” He nodded. “I think you can handle this, then. Sammy is the reason I fired Chloe. I didn’t want to do it. Kept giving her another chance, and another, until finally…”

  My shoulders slumped at the thought of what her relationship with Sammy had cost Chloe. “Poor kid.”

  “She got distracted.” Abner glanced over at a workstation that had none of the kinds of photos and personal items of the other workstations. “Whatever is going on with Sammy distracted her. Got her mind off her work.”

  “As a tattoo artist?” I, too, looked at the seemingly abandoned workstation.

  “She was apprenticing.”

  “Oh,” I said, as if I had a clue what that entailed.

  “Mostly she did body piercings.” He fingered his earring. “She was really good with those.”

  “Takes one to pierce one, I guess.” I laughed at my own lame joke.

  He shrugged. “But recently, the more involved she got with Sammy, she started to get nervous. Jumpy.”

  I didn’t know a thing about apprenticing at a tattoo parlor or doing body piercings, but it did seem to me that jumpiness and nerves were not the kind of thing you’d look for in this line of work.

  “Do you have any idea what they are involved in?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Do you think she’s in danger?”

  “You mean physical danger? Like he might do her harm?”

  My stomach churned.

  Maxine looked at me, and I knew she was thinking this was a job for someone with a little more experience. I also knew that, like me, she believed the Lord had brought us this far and would see us to the end, no matter what.

  “Does he hit her?” I asked.

  “If I knew he did that, if I ever had any evidence of that, I would have stepped in.”

  Maxine finally spoke, and I wondered if she meant the message as much for me as for Abner. “She wouldn’t have listened to you.”

  “I know. But maybe he would have.” He curled his hand into a fist.

  “That’s not the way we generally do things on our team.” Maxine’s tone was soothing but uncompromising.

  He relaxed his hand and met my gaze. “What makes you think she’s going to listen to you?”

  “She probably won’t,” Maxine said.

  I sighed. “But we have to try.”

  “Gotcha.” He dipped his head to acknowledge our effort. “I hope you find her, then, and that you…you know…make a difference.”

  In other words, he didn’t think two chubby old ladies could pull a lost little lamb like that from the brink of whatever danger she had chosen for herself.

  “We’re not alone,” I said. “We have some other friends—and, of course, the Lord. We’ll keep looking.”

  He nodded. “Guess there isn’t much else to do, then.”

  “Pray for her,” I suggested.

  “I do,” he said, and I had no doubt that he did.

  Now the problem with looking for lost sheep is that they can get themselves into all kind of places where shepherds and middle-aged Christian ladies might not always have a strong foothold. But that doesn’t mean we should just stay home and knit.

  Chapter Eight

  Some say beauty is only skin-deep. But then, so are most rashes. And so are those tattoos down at Body Art by Abner, some of which made my skin itch, just looking at them.

  I often wonder about the people who get tattoos like that, if they give any thought to when those ornaments and the bodies sporting them are no longer a thing of beauty. I mean, in sixty or seventy years, will sweet young caregivers named Hazel and Ike, working in senior settings, use those faded barbed-wire armbands and withered hip-riding butterflies to tell all the Lindsays and Ashtons apart? Do these children not understand what happens to skin with age? A whole bouquet of red roses on a fellow’s shoulder at twenty will more closely resemble a bowl of raisins, with hair sprouting out of some of them, at sixty.

  And what about those piercings? Some young people have turned their entire heads into pincushions. Most of them don’t even know what a pincushion is, either! Some of them have enough metal in their faces to attract magnets right off their grandma’s fridge, which I think is a pretty clear way of saying, Hey, look at me! But when you do—look at them, you know—they get all surly and say, What are you looking at? and I want to grab a mirror and hold it up, saying, Isn’t it obvious? Though some people might say that us oldsters aren’t much better, with our dyed hair and bright-colored accessories, and that it’s all vanity, I say…

  “Odessa?”

  “What, Maxine?”

  “Beauty may be skin deep, but babbling bores clean into the brain.”

  “Point taken.”

  Beauty is more than skin deep, and we all know it. That doesn’t mean a person shouldn’t try to clean up and look presentable whenever possible.

  “Good job.”

  “Thank you.”

  Clink.

  “Where to now, Odessa?” Into the truck we hopped again, and out we went into the wide, wide world—by way of the narrow path prescribed in the Bible, of course.

  To get from where we’d parked to go to the tattoo parlor to Main Street required a sharp turn and getting us
over a big, jutting bump of concrete. That bumper-chunker, as anyone who ever went over it too fast and surveyed the damage later might call it, marked the end of the pothole-pitted back alley and the beginning of the main roads. Those very main roads were the ones that high-profile taxpayers used, and so they were kept in much better shape. I held on to the steering wheel with both hands, both forearms and one knee, to try to make the transition smooth going for my pal and me. That’s what friends do, isn’t it? Try to make life smooth going whenever they can?

  That’s all I wanted for our flea market foundlings, after all. To try to smooth the way and illuminate their feet and, well, yes, maybe give them a push in the right direction. But to do that, I had to find my foundlings, and right now one had gone astray.

  I eased my truck onto Main and took a left on Mockingbird. Gloria’s contact sheet had listed phone numbers, but the only addresses had been the e-mail kind. But I thought since Chloe worked around here, she might live around here, and if she lived around here, she might just be, as the kids say, hanging out around here. If the kids still say that. If not, you know what I mean. “Let’s see. If you were a girl…”

  “I was. Once.” Maxine resumed her straight-armed position in the passenger seat.

  “If you were Chloe…” I began again.

  Sincerity, not sarcasm or even the tiniest hint of contempt, filled Maxine’s expression, and she shook her head, saying, “Oh, I was never her.”

  “Not even a little bit?” I caught Maxine’s gaze, and though I have no proof whatsoever that I am capable of doing this, I felt sure that I had a twinkle in my eye. It suggested that I thought my upright and proper friend had had a bit of an, uh…flamboyant streak in her youth.

  She pressed her lips tight, and for a second I thought I wasn’t going to hear a peep out of her. Not even the slightest concession, much less a full and complete confession. But suddenly a schoolbus filled with kids trundled by, and she sighed. “As soon as I walked far enough down the street that I knew my mama, nor any of her friends, nor any of my friend’s mamas, nor anyone from church, would see me, I rolled up my skirt at the waistband to hike it up to my knees and put on pink frosted lipstick.”