The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

by Annie Jones

  That right there pretty much summed up my prospects these days. Shop. Eat. Try to get my husband off the couch.

  I sighed. “It’s just that…chairing this committee, lending support to Jan, cleaning Chloe up, playing cupid, it all gave me a sense of accomplishment. It made me feel that I hadn’t used up all my usefulness quite yet. That I wasn’t the big-haired-granny-lady equivalent of an eggbeater or apron.”

  Maxine touched my arm. “But we love eggbeaters and aprons.”

  I exhaled and took one hand from the wheel just long enough to give her fingers a pat. “We do, but nobody else even knows what they are for, Maxine. They see them as just worthless junk.”

  The gentle touch on the arm turned into a smack on the flab—you know, that flabby upper part that goes south after a certain age. Bring the back of a bare hand down on that lovely body part and the sound it makes is part pop, part flap. Plap. I have to mention that because it gives the flavor of Maxine’s outrage. She wasn’t being abusive, but she did get my attention. And she didn’t leave it at a plap on the flab, either.

  “Odessa Pepperdine you are not worthless!” She said, it coming out all rushed and indignant. “You are not junk!”

  “Thank you for the vote of confidence, Maxine, but I can’t help but look at what I set out to do here, to get Bernadette a date, to show Jan another point of view, to break beneath Chloe’s hard exterior…”

  “I don’t know about her hard exterior, but you did get her to fix up her hair. That should count for something.”

  “One out of three.” I held up my index finger and pushed out my lower lip in a good old-fashioned sulk and said, “Not a very good record. I just thought I would have done better, that I’d have made more headway towards my goals by now.”

  “And it is all about your goals, isn’t it?” Maxine pointed to a car pulling out from a side road as her way of warning me to stay sharp. Maxine likes to think of herself as my eyes and ears on the road, and I guess my ego-detector everywhere else. “Never mind what they want for themselves, or even what the Lord might really have planned, as opposed to what you wish He had in store.”

  “I only want the best for them.” The truck bumped along. The Alvarez family lived in a subdivision just off a dusty old road that formed a semicircle on the south side of Castlerock. One day this would all be nice big houses, a new grocery store, maybe a country club or golf course. But now, not many people took this particular road unless they lived out this way or were up to something they didn’t want anyone else to see. Not that we could see all that much, what with all the dust the wheels had kicked up.

  Maxine waved her hand in front of her face, as if that would do any good. She coughed, even though the reddish-brown cloud remained completely outside the cab.

  “I only want the best for everyone,” I said, trying not to sound too pouty.

  “You only want to rule the world, Odessa.”

  “You’re the one wants that tiara so bad, Maxine.”

  She raised her hands, fingers splayed like crystal-encrusted spikes on a glittering band. “I only want to embrace my inner princess.”

  “And I only want…”

  “To be the Queen Mama of Castlerock, Texas.”

  Now how could I argue with that? “It beats being an eggbeater.”

  “Maybe you should be an eggbeater, girl. Because you sure take the cake.” Maxine laughed at her own cornball joke.

  And because she laughed, I laughed, too. When Maxine laughs, everyone around her has to follow. It’s infectious. But then, so are rashes and twenty-four-hour bugs and like both of those things, it can…it causes you to…it tends to…Oh, never mind about the analogy. I got to laughing with Maxine, and went sailing right by the turn to go into the Alvarezes’ subdivision.

  “About this cake…” I said, straining my eyes to see beyond the dust so I didn’t miss the next driveway or entrance to a cow pasture where I could pull in and turn us around.

  “Yes?”

  “Angel food or devil’s food?”

  “Coconut!”

  “Careful what you wish for,” I warned, already wondering could I get a store-bought version or would I have to make one myself.

  “I could say the same to you, Miss Queen Mama Wannabe. Careful what you wish for for other people, as well.” Her voice went quiet, and she twisted in the seat so that her shoulders faced in my direction. “More careful still when you take it upon yourself to try to make those wishes come true. When you mix into people’s love lives…”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t mix into anyone’s love life but Bernadette’s.”

  “And Reverend Cordell’s.”

  “And Reverend Cordell’s.”

  “And, by default, Chloe and Sammy’s.”

  “Chloe and Sammy? I refuse to call that a love life, Maxine. That boy mistreats her.”

  “Okay, then, Jan and Morty.”

  “Again, I did not set out to meddle there, and so far I haven’t really. Other than to send David over to talk to Morty and to try to be a friend to Jan and offer her support and advice.”

  “Sticking your nose in other people’s marriages, even if you use your husband’s nose to do it, and lending unasked-for advice even in the name of friendship. I don’t know what you call that in the part of Castlerock where you grew up, but where I was raised, we call that mixing in.”

  “Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread, eh?”

  “If there is one thing I know, Odessa, it is that you are no fool.” She reached over and took my hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Warmth and love—if you can feel love in a touch, and I believe you can—flowed from my dear sister in Christ to me. It filled my heart, even the hollow part where doubt and fear had burrowed deep. When she let go, I still felt her raising me up. When she spoke again, I knew her words would do the same.

  “And if there is one thing I don’t know, it’s…What is that man doing?”

  Pop. Talk about a way to burst a bubble of goodwill and joy between friends. Seeing a twenty-year-old van emblazoned with red-and-yellow flames on a mostly rust-colored—wait, make that mostly rusted-through-and-through—body broken down a few hundred yards ahead, with a man standing in the road waving his arms, will definitely do it.

  I slowed the truck and inched in close to the steering wheel, squinting as hard as I dared without tempting the onset of deep eye wrinkles. “That’s not a man, Maxine. That’s Reverend Cordell.”

  Maxine shot me a look.

  “You know what I mean.” I veered to the right, taking my truck as far off the road as I could and still keep it out of the ditch.

  I’d hardly wrestled the old gearshift into Park before Jake had popped open the passenger door. “You two are as welcome as an answered prayer.”

  He started to climb into the seat, which proved an interesting task, since Maxine had not yet relinquished it.

  “Hold on a minute there, Reverend. What are you doing?” she asked, even as she scooted and scrambled in my direction along the bench seat.

  “We’ve got to get moving,” he said without any explanation, as if we surely had been following his activities on some kind of minister-monitoring system and knew just where he wanted to get moving to and why.

  “Get moving where? And why?” I asked, not taking the car out of Park.

  “Out of here,” he said, practically bouncing on the seat, like some overgrown kid. “Because Chloe took my car.”

  I blinked at the van a few feet away from us. I believed I had seen the monstrosity in the alley near the tattoo parlor the other day, but I didn’t know who owned it or how exactly it had come to rest in this spot in the Texas countryside. A million questions filled my mind. And given those odds, you’d think a better one would have tumbled out of my mouth than “Why didn’t you catch a ride with her?”

  “I tried, but found it difficult to get in with the thing roaring off down the road at sixty miles an hour.”

  “Your car went sixty miles an hour
on this road?” Again, out of the scads of pertinent and constructive questions I might have asked, I had chosen one that had all the relevance of an eggbeater in a modern kitchen.

  “Odessa, the girl has stolen the Reverend’s car.” Maxine said it slow and forceful, the way one might explain something obvious to a two-year-old.

  “I know that, Maxine, I’m just trying to…” Ignore it. Pretend it’s not true. “I’m just trying to make sense of it.”

  “It’s simple, really.” Jake made big, sweeping gestures as he spoke, seemingly unaware of how many times he almost poked Maxine in the eye as he did so. “I figured at some point Sammy would come joyriding down this road in the car he stole from Chloe.”

  “Because this is the most joyful road in Castlerock.”

  “Because this is the most popular road for kids to meet up outside Castlerock,” Jake said, ignoring my little jab. “Chloe pointed it out to me the day we went up in the balloon. We couldn’t see it from there, of course, but when I asked her if she and Sammy didn’t have anything better to do that to hang around the closed flea market, she said they usually came out here and hung around with friends.”

  “So you figured she would end up here looking for Sammy, too.”

  Jake nodded and pointed toward the stalled van. “I planned to wait for them—Sammy and/or Chloe—but instead I found her broken down, and when I jumped out of my car to try to talk to her…”

  “She jumped in and took off?” I shook my head.

  “You’re a good man, Reverend.” Maxine patted his hand. “Dumb, but good.”

  “Sometimes good just looks dumb to people who can’t see the big picture, Maxine,” I reminded her.

  “The only picture called for here is a mug shot.” Maxine snatched up her purse and began rummaging through it. “We need to hunker down here at the scene of the crime and call the police.”

  “Chloe isn’t a criminal,” Jake protested.

  “She stole your car.” Maxine’s hand, her wrist and all of her bracelets disappeared inside her oversize purse.

  “She borrowed my car. I just haven’t had the chance to tell her I’d be happy to lend it to her yet.”

  “And to be fair, have you seen his car, Maxine?” I tsked and shook my head. “Even if she did steal it, I think the worst you could call it would be petty theft.”

  “Petty theft is still theft. You don’t help people by making excuses. It’s not your place to say one way of breaking the law is not as bad as another.”

  “You have a point Maxine. But I don’t think Chloe meant to break the law. She’s…”

  “It’s that Sammy. He’s a charmer, that one.”

  “Yes. And he has led her to make some bad choices.”

  “Criminal choices?”

  “I don’t know. I admit that.” Jake held up his hands in surrender. “But I do presume, from what I’ve seen of the girl, that she can make better choices. My faith demands that I believe she wants to make better choices.”

  “Mine too,” I said softly at first and then, upon reflection and the pushing aside of my own self-doubt, a bit louder. “Mine too, Reverend.”

  “Can I count on you, Odessa?” he asked, his eyes unsure and his mouth showing only a hint of that fabulous smile.

  “She has ten fingers and ten toes. You can count on those, young man.” Maxine finally pulled out the cell phone she’d been searching for and held it aloft. “Count on her to use some of those fingers to dial the authorities and some of those toes to stomp on the gas and get us where we belong.”

  “You can count on me, Jake. And so can Chloe. Fingers, toes, mind and body. I’ll even mess up my hair for the cause!”

  “Odessa!”

  I looked at my friend’s earnest face. She meant well, truly she did. But Maxine was a woman who saw things the way she saw them and acted upon them accordingly. Right. Wrong, Left. Right. Black. White. She did not think of things in terms of degrees or shades.

  With that in mind, I looked past my friend and asked Jake, “Do you mind if we just run Maxine home first?”

  “Run me home?” Maxine bristled. She bristled so good I practically felt porcupine quills sticking me all up and down my back. “Like fire you will.”

  “I thought you wanted no part of this.”

  She sat silent for a moment, with her face turned straight ahead. Her lips twitched. She stroked the sleek case of her cell phone with her thumb. Finally, she tilted her chin up and narrowed her eyes. “What I want no part of is the two of you coming out of all this with better stories to tell than me. And for those stories to all start off with ‘After we dropped Maxine off safe at home.’”

  “Oh, Maxine…” Sentimental old me, my voice got all craggy and hoarse. My eyes even went a bit misty. I patted my pal’s leg. “You don’t want to be an eggbeater, either.”

  It might have been a sweet, mushy moment, except Jake clapped his hands and said, way too loudly, “Let’s do this, ladies.”

  “You got it, Reverend.” I started up the engine. “We’re not done being of use yet.”

  “What about the van?” Maxine was still holding the phone in the palm of her hand.

  “Oh, I already called Abner and told him where I’d found it. He said no problem. He knows how to start it and will come get it.”

  “That Abner, he is a genuinely nice guy, you know it?” I had to back up the truck to stay clear of the ditch, and in doing so had a chance to catch a glimpse of the Reverend’s face as I added, “Even Bernadette thinks so.”

  “Bernadette? And Abner?” Jake leaned forward to peer at me around Maxine. “Really?”

  “Life is full of surprises.” I mashed down on the brake and muscled the gearshift into Drive. “You know he’s a Christian, don’t you?”

  “So he said.” Jake’s eyebrows crimped down. He touched the rim of his glasses. “And he was really concerned about Chloe.”

  “Just goes to show you that God uses all sorts,” I said, feeling a bit too pleased with myself for having planted that seed of a thought about Bernadette and Abner in Jake’s mind.

  “Even us out-of-sorts.” Maxine swung her hand around in a circle like a lasso before pointing down the road and ordering, “Drive, Odessa! Drive!”

  How do you know when enough is enough? Some people might think two sixty-something wives of retired ministers would have had enough adventure, would have had enough of taking risks on behalf of people who might not appreciate the effort. But as far as I can tell, there is no retirement age for do-gooders. There is no junk heap where we toss human beings and say, That’s it! She’s too broken. She’s too battered. She’s too old.

  We are all redeemable.

  We are all useful.

  We all have potential.

  We may just have to get creative to find it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ecclesiastes reminds us there is a time to be silent and a time to speak. The right place, the right occasion, for everything. All things in the right season.

  We all have our seasons, too. The stages of a life, the ever-changing landscape of a relationship. God gave us this world of absolute wonder to help us see that even after the hope of spring has faded into the hardened cold of winter, as long as there is still life, rebirth will come.

  I am not all used up just because I have seen too many summers. I will only be used up when God has gotten all the good He can out of me and calls me home, saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

  Until then, it is my job to make myself a blessing to everyone I can. Silent? I can’t be silent about the goodness of my God.

  Make a joyful noise! Shout and clap and stomp your feet! some people say. When the Lord is working inside you, you just can’t stay quiet.

  “Yeee-haw!” The tires hit the jagged edge of the pavement, the truck bucked and bounced. We were on our way to find our Chloe, and I just had to cut loose!

  “Why, Mrs. Pepperdine!” Jake pushed his glasses back into place after my driving jounced
them down the bridge of his nose. “I had no idea you had so much genuine cowgirl in you.”

  “Cowgirl? Me?” I thought that over for a second. “Why not? I was Texas born and Texas bred, and you know what else…?”

  “If she says when she dies she’ll be Texas dead, do you think it would be unchristian of me to smack her one, Reverend?” Maxine spoke low and out of the corner of her mouth.

  “If you have something to say to me, say it outright, Maxine.” I led by example, my voice clear and my words plain. “Don’t go whispering as if there were some way I couldn’t hear you in this small truck cab with the three of us squashed in here like…like…”

  “Sardines?” the Reverend suggested.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, young man.” Maxine gave his arm a motherly squeeze.

  “Really!” I laughed and gave him my best bless-your-heart-you-poor-simpleminded-child grin. “What on earth would small salty fish be doing driving around in a truck on the back roads of Castlerock, Texas?”

  “Well, I…uh…it’s just a…” He cleared his throat. He glanced from one of us to the other and back again, as if he thought I really didn’t understand the cliché he had used.

  Maxine stifled a giggle. “Take my advice and stop this while you still can. If you let her get you talking about canned fish, before you know it, puns will begin flying about chickens of the sea, and once that can of worms—”

  “Tuna, Maxine. Chicken of the sea is tuna,” I reminded her, trying not to snicker. “A can of worms is a whole other kettle of fish.”

  “See?” Maxine poked Jake, then pointed to me. “Don’t start these things around Odessa. It was bad enough you called her a cowgirl.”

  “What’s so bad about being a cowgirl?” The road before us forked, and I squinted at it for only a second before I chose the road less traveled. No, not because of the poem, but because if I were a couple of kids wanting to get up to some misdeed, that’s where I’d go to get up to it. “My Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills, you know. Maybe it’s time I did get in touch with my inner cowgirl.”