The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

by Annie Jones

  “I thought the plan was to be in charge of everything—and everyone—in Castlerock.” Maxine rolled her eyes. A sort of smile played on her lips. Despite always saying things like that, and her reluctance to join us at first, that woman was enjoying this every bit as much as I was. Maybe more. She had suggested I was only now realizing how to become my best self, but I could see that she was doing a little of that herself, growing into more of the person she knew she could become, too. “How are we going to find time to run barrel races at the rodeo if we ever hope to get crowned the right Royal Highnesses of Busybodyness?”

  “I just don’t see a conflict in all that, Maxine.” I played it real sober, shaking my head and speaking all solemn even when I added on, “Only I think we should go by the title the Royal Highnesses of Being Ourselves.”

  “Odessa, honey, you have got a way of getting away with far too much.” She nudged me with her elbow. “But I have to admit, I like it.”

  “Me too, Maxine.” I nudged her right back. “Let’s do it. Let’s us be Cowgirl Queens. We can get pink hats and put sparkly tiaras on the front of them, you know, like the flag bearers at the rodeos do?”

  She chuckled, but I could tell, deep down she was considering it. “We don’t have to ride ponies, do we?”

  That got to Reverend Cordell. I guess the image of me and Maxine in pink cowboy hats and tiaras chasing down car thieves on the back of a couple of fat spotted ponies would tickle even the most righteous man.

  “You ladies are wasted spending your free time at the flea market, I tell ya. You need to work up an act and take it on the road.” He put his arm on the edge of the window.

  “That’s where we are now—on the road,” I said.

  “But the road to where?” Maxine looked around, leaning in and out and to the side to scope out our surroundings.

  I slowed the truck down. Only then, when I found us in the middle of nowhere, did I think to ask, “Where do you think Chloe might have got to, Reverend?”

  “I wanted to check all around here first.” He, too, bobbed his head and bowed his shoulders so that he could peer through all the truck windows. “Obviously Chloe was out here earlier. But since we haven’t seen any sign of her, we might try some of the places that Abner said Sammy likes to…do business.”

  “Business?” Maxine snorted. It was a very ladylike, authoritative, savvy sort of snort, to be sure. “That scruffy kid hardly seems the businessman type to me.”

  “What are you talking about? Drugs?” I started the truck rolling slowly forward again. The very notion that anything untoward might have been going on down this quiet country lane made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Of course, I am not naive. Well, I am not totally naive. I know that people do all manner of things all over the place. Even in places frequented by cowgirls and ministers. But still, the sheer isolation of this place, with this deserted road that dropped off into overgrown ditches, would lend itself quite nicely to clandestine exchanges. “I guess when I think of young people running afoul of the law, I just naturally think of drugs. Is that what you mean?”

  “Actually no. Maybe. But…” He pushed his fingers back through his dark brown hair, which made the few silver strands there stand out all the more. “If Sammy sells ’em, he doesn’t take ’em, and Abner felt almost certain that Chloe is clean, too.”

  “That’s a relief,” Maxine said.

  I shored it up with a heartfelt “Amen.”

  “Abner didn’t know too much about Sammy’s dealings, only that the kid was into something shady and that it involved his interacting with the kind of people that gave Abner the creeps.”

  Maxine and I shared a look that said, The kind of people who give Abner the creeps? And we are out chasing those people down?

  Jake stroked his chin. “No, I don’t know what Sammy is up to, but you can bet it has some connection to the flea market.”

  “Our flea market?” I asked.

  “No!” Maxine gave a backhanded bat of her hand.

  “Yes.” Jake spoke firmly, and with his face turned away from us. “It’s the perfect cover for all kinds of mischief. You read the complaints and the police reports.”

  “Actually, I still have them, right…there.” I dipped my eyes to show the man where I had stashed the file folder I had originally planned to dump on Gloria Alvarez’s doorstep—her mailbox, really, but her doorstep in the sense that I had wanted to pawn my problems off on her. “Maybe you can figure out from those what he’s up to and where we can find Chloe.”

  “I feel just like Nancy Drew.” Maxine pressed her back to the seat to read the open file over the Reverend’s shoulder.

  “Odessa Pepperdine, girl detective. Or better yet—Odessa Pepperdine, agent for the Lord.” I liked it. I liked it a lot. “Let’s see, we could write all this up and call it The Case of the Dubious Balloonist!”

  “Or how about The Case of the Felonious Flea Market?” Maxine suggested.

  “I don’t like that one nearly as much.” I did a roundabout, which is a fancy way of saying I worked the truck back and forth on the narrow road until I had made a U-turn and pointed us back the way we had come. “I mean if you think about it…We know that the balloonist is dubious, but do we know that our flea market is felonious?”

  “I think maybe it is,” Jake muttered as he shuffled through the papers in the file. “Look, there are three complaints here about ‘unsavory’ sorts—that’s the word used by one of the people filing the report.”

  “Let me guess. Jan Belmont?” Unsavory. It was a Jan kind of word.

  The Reverend did not answer me, and rightly so. Once again, the man went up in my estimation, and he didn’t even realize it, I would guess.

  He just went right on reading from the pages. “Unsavory sorts and suspicious types hanging around the east side of the flea market when it’s not in operation.”

  “The east side?”

  “Isn’t Jan’s house east of the drive-in?” Maxine pointed to her left, then to her right, and then raised her gaze skyward as if that might help her get her bearings.

  Jake, too, raised his eyes. “That’s the side where we parked when we went to do the tour, right?”

  Fighting the temptation to check and see if there was a map printed on the ceiling of my truck, I glued my eyes to the road and said, “Yes, the owner didn’t want to have a bunch of cars there when it was closed. Thought it might start rumors.”

  “About what?” Maxine crinkled up her nose.

  “About anything.” The truck thumped over a rut, and I hung onto the steering wheel with both hands. “It’s Castlerock, midweek on a summer afternoon. Lots of people have nothing better to do than to speculate about all sort of things, and a bunch of cars parked at the drive-in is as good a fodder as anything.”

  “I bet the landowner realizes he’s on borrowed time with all this.” Jake closed the file and tapped the edge of it against his leg. “Only a matter of time before somebody gets fired up and holds him accountable for some of the things that go on there.”

  “Better someone does that than throws eggs at Jan,” I murmured, thinking back to my own worries over what might happen if our resident unsavory-sort detector got the wrong people riled up. And, of course, as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew how it would sound to the others. And rather than try to explain it all, I decided to just go on talking to cover it up. Yes, it’s a pride thing, and not pretty, but that is what I did. “I suppose that’s why the drive-in owner had us park on the east side, too. The angle of the screen, and the trees and fences, they all hide that spot unless you’re right up on it.”

  “Then that’s where we have to go,” Jake said. “Get right up on it, too, and see for ourselves.”

  “I am already on my way.”

  And I not only was—on my way, I mean—I got us there in good time, without so much as bending the speed limit, though I can’t say the same for Maxine.

  By the time we came bouncing into the pocke
d and furrowed entryway by the old Satellite Vista sign that once posted movie dates and times, Maxine looked truly and sounded totally bent out of shape. “Odessa, I liked it better when I was driving this heap.”

  “Shh. I liked it better when we were being quiet.”

  “When did that happen?” Maxine asked, in complete disbelief that we had ever known a time like that.

  “We’re starting it right now,” I said, putting my finger to my lips. “We’re doing the Nancy Drew thing, remember?”

  “Only it’s not Nancy Drew, is it?” Jake’s open, kind features clouded. “I shouldn’t have gotten you two involved in this. I should have sent you both home. We have no idea what we might find in there.”

  “Well, we are not going to drop down out of the trees on anyone like ninja church ladies!” I kept the truck rolling as quietly as possible toward the east side of the old structure. “We’re just going make a pass by that secluded lot and see if either Chloe’s car or the one she stole from you is sitting there.”

  “She didn’t really steal—”

  “Oh, give it up, Reverend. She did.” I didn’t mean to snap, but really, the man already had some gray hair. “You are too old for pretend games. Sure, you want to think the best of the girl. We all do. But sometimes the only real way to do the best thing for someone is to stop thinking the best and start speaking the truth.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said softly.

  The truck’s tires rolled over the loose gravel strewn across the old pavement. In the silence of the cab, we heard every crunch like some crazy extra-amplified breakfast cereal.

  Jake sat forward, placing his hand on the spot where Maxine usually braced herself against my enthusiastic way of negotiating the roads. Slowly, that wise and comforting smile that changed the nature of his normally normal face emerged. “And, Mrs. Pepperdine…?”

  “What, Jake?”

  “I think you’d make a real good ninja church lady.”

  I opened my mouth to laugh, or maybe it was to say something terribly, terribly clever, I don’t know, because at that same instant Maxine let out such a violent, startled gasp that it completely cleared my mind.

  “What is it? Do you see my car?” Jake asked.

  “No,” Maxine whispered. “I see…We should just go.”

  “What? What do you see?” I craned my neck, but at first I didn’t see a thing except the trees and the heavily shaded spot beneath them where only stray shafts of light came through and fell upon…

  “I’ve seen that cane before,” I said softly.

  “What cane?” Jake asked.

  I stopped the truck.

  “Morty Belmont’s cane.” Maxine raised her hand to the indicate the pale-colored staff propped against a large tree.

  “It’s just a cane.” Jake frowned. “Anyone could have left it there. Maybe someone left it when they came to the flea market. How do you know it’s Morty Belmont’s?”

  “Because there he is.” Maxine dropped her hand and, with that movement, whether intentionally or not, brought my and the minister’s gazes downward so that we finally saw what had made her gasp.

  “Helen Davenport!” There, in Morty’s still-mending arms, stood the woman who had sought to keep Bernadette from even meeting, much less finding romance with, Jake Cordell. “Morty Belmont is meeting secretly with Helen Davenport!”

  Now who was playing at pretend? Anyone with eyes could see that this was more than just some covert get-together. They had not gone through all the machinations it would have taken for them to get here so they could swap recipes or work on a community service subcommittee. And though they were simply sitting in the grass at the base of the tree, they were close in each other’s arms and lost in each other’s eyes.

  This was private.

  This was intimate.

  This was…heart wrenching.

  “Should we tell Jan?” I whispered.

  Maxine raised her head and, with a short, solemn nod, directed our attention through the tops of the trees, to a tiny shape on a rooftop. “I think she already knows.”

  Some people believe there is a lesson in every event and circumstance. That every decision we make has the power to enlighten and every choice the power to change us, for the good or the not-so-good. And that if we try, we can learn something from both. I had to wonder what lesson this day had delivered.

  To everything there is a season. A time for every purpose under heaven. Among them are:

  A time to weep and a time to laugh.

  A time to search and a time to give up.

  A time to be silent and a time to speak.

  I guess the thing I had to ask myself was, what time was it now? The time to stop pretending and speak the truth? Or the time to shut up and mind my own business?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Noise or silence—whichever you choose, none of it matters if nobody will listen to you. You’ve heard the riddle, If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  I don’t know. I can only say that, in my own experience, lost in the wilderness of being a nonretired wife married to a fully retired minister, when I speak, my husband seems to pick up only noise and responds mostly with silence. I have run out of ideas about how to get and hold his attention, and frankly, it worries me.

  Was that what had gone awry between Jan and Morty? Had we all become so blind and deaf to each other that taking Chloe’s road, the piercings, the costumes, the car thievery, seemed the only way to avoid being as overlooked and undervalued as a…a…a Bernadette?

  I’ve lived in the background of my own life for so long, and now these women that I had set out to help, that I have come to care for, are making me reassess my choices, making me long to find my voice. If only there was somebody listening!

  “Nancy Drew, David.” I had tried to keep it simple and use small words, not because I thought David needed small words, but because I thought they had a better chance of getting through. Compared with phrases like “surrendering my chairmanship of the community action council” and “dubious balloonist” and “ninja church ladies dropping from the trees,” it seemed like “car thief,” “creep,” and “cheater” had a better chance of standing out enough to draw his attention. “I said that Maxine and I felt like Nancy Drew. Not Scooby-Doo!”

  “But if you’re involved with teenagers and chasing criminals away from an abandoned drive-in?” He rustled the paper in his hands and did not meet my eyes across the kitchen table. “That sounds straight out of Scooby-Doo to me.”

  I put my elbows on the table. Yes, I know it’s bad manners, but I had cleared away the supper dishes already and the thunk my elbows made when they landed on the soft yellow checked tablecloth gave me a tiny bit of satisfaction. David didn’t even look over the top of the sports page at the sound.

  I sighed. “I don’t know what bothers me more, that since your retirement you’ve come to learn the complexities, or lack thereof, of a cartoon mystery show, or that you haven’t really heard anything I said.”

  “I’ve heard every word,” he replied. This was an old trick of his. It was not a lie. He had heard me, just like he heard the hum of the refrigerator motor a few feet away or the clunk-ka-chunk of the old air conditioner turning off and on. My voice had become nothing more than the whine of an old appliance to him. And if I said that to him, he would lower his paper at last, lift up my hand, kiss my fingers, then remind me that he wouldn’t be able to survive in Texas without his fridge or his Freon-cooled air—or me.

  The man knew how to work all the angles, and I loved him so much I let him get away with it.

  “Anyway, Maxine and the Reverend Cordell and I did the chasing.” I picked up my iced tea glass and swirled the last slivers of ice around. “The teenagers—well, young adults, really—were nowhere to be found. The drive-in is not abandoned. It’s where they hold the flea market, and…”

  He flipped a page lazily and coughed.

  I plunked the glass
back down on the table. “And why do I even bother?”

  At last he lowered the paper and smiled at me. “What?”

  “More tea?” I asked, reaching for the tall glass pitcher of sweet tea on the table between us.

  He held his glass out, and I filled it almost to the top. I know my husband, and if he planned to pretend to hear my musings about the day’s events, he would need caffeine and sugar, and plenty of ’em.

  “The drive-in is where they have the flea market, which reminds me!” All right, might as well get this out in the open now. It’s probably already obvious, but I have reached an age that when something important pops into my head I feel compelled to announce it on the spot, for fear of it slipping right back out of my brain again. It’s like I have a banana peel in my short-term-memory lobe or something, A thought hardly shows up before swhoooosh, it’s gone again. I can’t say how many times I’ve had something vital to say to someone and in the length of time it took to walk over to them or dial their phone number I’ve completely forgotten it. So when talk turned to the flea market and I had David’s attention, I felt I needed to say, “Did I tell you about the problem with Helen Davenport’s credit card?”

  “I hope you didn’t. Strikes me as a bit too close to spreading gossip, my dear.” Said it sort of superior and snottylike, I thought. Not in an “I’m a better Christian than you” way, but with that ever-irritating “men don’t do this stuff, and if women were half the men that men are, they wouldn’t, either” sort of attitude. Patronizing. In fact, I think that’s the actual definition of patronizing. That almost haughty tone. The hint of boredom or detachment in the expression. The very man-ness of it all.

  “Well, that’s where you are wrong.” I smiled. After over thirty years of marriage to this thoughtful and compassionate human being who chooses his words carefully and tries to always act in faith and do the right thing, it just tickled me pink to be able to tell him he was wrong about something. Oh, I know, it’s a fault, but as faults go, I think it’s one a lot of wives share. “It’s not gossip. It’s part of my work for my action council.”