The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas (9 page)

The rest of the morning went by quickly, especially after we got set up and Maxine ran off to get us a big breakfast. I don’t know if it was the extra bacon or the fact that I so wanted to do well for Bernadette, or maybe I just felt particularly compelled to taste a little bit of success on my first and only day as a bona fide working stiff, but along about noon, when the traffic hit its peak, I got an idea.

“I thought you were of an anti-tiara frame of mind, Odessa,” Maxine said when I shared it with her.

“Buying them, yes. Wearing them to attract customers to Bernadette’s booth? I am all for that.” In went the key, the display case opened, and out slid the blue velvet stand where those four dazzling tiaras twinkled at us in the high July sun. “Which one do you want, Maxine?”

She put her hand on her hip, and all those polka-dot bracelets went clattering down to collect around her bent wrist. “Which one do you think?”

I plucked up the biggest of the four.

She accepted it most graciously, and put it on with such ease that it appeared she had done that kind of thing before. Maxine is a woman of many talents, but given her
husband’s occupation and her own early penchant for asserting herself as a strong woman of independence, situating a tiara on her head was not something I’d have expected her to have mastered.

“Come clean, girl,” I said, even as I picked up a delicate glittering headpiece with pearl accents for myself. “You’ve won some beauty pageants in your time, haven’t you?”

“A couple. In college. But Odessa Pepperdine, if you ever tell anyone…”

“Who would I tell?” I looked out over the vast array of humanity milling all around us and opened my mouth as if I was about to call out to everyone.

Maxine lunged at me to put her hand over my mouth.

“Who are you two supposed to be?” Chloe did not cross the narrow aisle, but she did inch over to the very edge of her own booth to get as close as she could when she spoke to us.

“We’re the Tiara Madres!” I hollered back to her. “And we have the best treasure to be found in the entire flea market!”

“Guest books and unity candles?” She crinkled up her nose.

“No. Wisdom.” I struggled to get my tiara on straight without deflating an hour’s worth of work on my hair. “The voice of experience.”

A woman walked by wearing stretch pants that showed two inches of bare skin above a pair of rolled-down white socks and a shirt that showed two rolls of bare stomach above the exhausted waistband. Maxine shook her head and added her two cents. “Fashion advice, too.”

“Because we have it going on in
that
department!” I
yelled, pinching Maxine’s voluminous yellow dress with the big orange poppies all over it.

At that, Chloe laughed.

Honest. The girl
laughed.
My heart swelled at the sight.

“Well, my work is done,” I murmured, grinning what I supposed looked like an idiot’s grin. “I can retire happy. We made Chloe laugh.”

“Last time I looked, making Chloe or anyone else laugh was not on Bernadette’s list of things we were to accomplish here today.”

“It is never a wasted effort to lift a weary heart, Maxine.”

She froze and looked at me. I could see the wheels turning behind those big brown eyes of hers, and knew she was trying to think of something smart or sassy or even a little bit stinging to say in response. Only she didn’t. One beat. Two. Three beats passed before she couldn’t hold it in any longer and she broke up.

“When you’re right, you’re right, Odessa. I say it would not be a waste of our day if were to spend the rest of our time here less worried about making a sale and more intent on making the day brighter for everyone who passes by here.”

And so we did.

Or at least we tried.

And in the process, we made a few friends and more than a few sales. We put the checks where the checks belonged. We put the cash where the cash belonged. But when we put the credit card where the credit card belonged…?

“Nothing’s happening.”

“Where’s our Bernadette?” Mrs. Davenport had strolled up late in the day, all porcelain-capped teeth and plastic shopping bags.

In the big family photo album in my mind, the one that showed my many sisters in Christ, Mrs. Davenport was always the one in the group shot who was throwing things off-kilter for everyone else. No, not the one sticking her tongue out or wriggling around so that she appeared more of a smudge than a smiling face. She wouldn’t do anything that might actually detract from her own image. It was other people who had to watch out for her…input.

She was the one who, the second before the flash went off, liked to poke the person next to her in the ribs and say, “Your strap is twisted” or “Did you mean to have your hair that way?” or “I’m glad you’re standing in the front row where everyone can see you. You know the camera adds ten pounds?” Then she would smile brightly and the person she had just “helped out” became the one who looked bad in the photo.

She wasn’t a bad person. I don’t believe that of her for one second. She just couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. She liked to poke. She was a natural-born poker.

And people like me and Bernadette, we were just ripe for the poking. I tried to swipe her credit card again.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t our Bernadette train you on this part?”

She’s not
your
Bernadette,
I wanted to proclaim. She belongs to herself, and maybe someday, if she should so choose and he should ask, to Jake Cordell, despite your efforts to steal that away from her.

Instead, Maxine chimed in, “She’s taking the day off from the flea market. But we can take care of this for you.”

I shot Maxine a panicked glance. To anyone else I might have explained that I wasn’t sure what the problem was and
the credit card thing had been working just fine all day and couldn’t they pay cash or write a check, but Mrs. Davenport? One word from me, and I’d supply her with poking material for the rest of the year.

I said a quick prayer and slid the card through the reader again. Nothing.

“Maybe we should call Bernadette,” Maxine whispered.

I whispered back, my face frozen in a smile and my lips hardly moving, “If we call Bernadette, she won’t trust us to do this for her again.”

Maxine rolled her eyes. “Then, by all means…
call
her.”

“You get awful bossy when you put on a tiara, Maxine, you know that?”

She touched her fingertips to the fan-shaped silver frame set with all those sparkling crystals and her whole demeanor changed. Her shoulders went back, her eyes glinted. She set her jaw and took the card firmly from my hand. “We can do this now. And if we can’t, then…well, then we can always ask—”

“Chloe.” All day I’d been trying to think of a way to get close to the girl again, to try to open up the lines and maybe talk to her about her choices. In clothes, and in men.

“Oh, no.” Maxine glanced from the face of the credit card to the face of determination—mine—and spoke softly, so no one else could hear. “You have that Lucy Riccardo look in your eye. You have hatched a scheme to meddle in another innocent life.” She glanced at Chloe, then added, “In another
unsuspecting
life.”

“Maxine, I am not going to dignify that with a reply.”

“That’s because you can’t think of one.”

“I am ignoring you.”

“Odessa, just give me your cell phone so I can call—”

I held my hand up the way the kids do. Did. Yes, I am not too proud to acknowledge that by the time any trend trickles down to me, it is long past cool. Or phat. Or fly. Or whatever word they use now. Leaving Maxine with the card in her hand, I exited the At Your Service booth, talking all the way. “Look at me. I am the Queen of Ignoring All Naysayers. I am the Princess of Making This Card Thing Work and the Grand Duchess of Doing It Without Resorting to Calling Bernadette on Her Only Day Away from This Place in Forever.”

“I’d shudder to see the sash they’d have to use to print that title on,” Mrs. Davenport muttered.

“Luckily, I know just where Odessa could fit a sash that big.”

“Is that a comment about my behind?” I spun around to ask as I reached the health-food booth. Up until then, it had been just fun between us, but whenever anybody makes a remark about a woman’s behind, well, that’s when the gloves have come off for sure.

“No! I would never, no, not ever, sugar. That was meant to be a swipe at the size of your big
mouth.
” I know a lot of people won’t get this, but that made it all better. Because it wasn’t about my backside and because, well, I
do
have a big mouth, and it would probably take a big, big gag to shut me up.

Especially right then, when I was all worked up with the need to prove myself for Bernadette and
to
Mrs. Davenport and build a bridge to Chloe.

People were watching, and smiling. I guess that egged
me on, but I did notice it made Chloe cringe all the more when I stopped right in front of her at the health-food booth.

“Chloe, can you step over here and see if you can tell what we’re doing wrong with this card over here?”

“I…uh…” She hunched up her shoulders and looked around her. I could tell she didn’t like having all those eyes on her, which I found odd. A person who dresses the way she does, sticks rings and doodads in her eyebrows and earlobes and in her nose and then goes so far as to put paint in her hair, now that is a person one would think
wants
to draw attention to herself. But Chloe all but curled up into a ball and spoke so softly I had to practically read her lips to discern that she had said, “I guess I can give it a try.”

“Good.” I put my hand on her shoulder, you know, to try to bolster her confidence a little. Because hip young girls really do draw a lot of confidence from the approval of old ladies wearing prom tiaras, right? I sighed and tried to salvage it all by adding, “Maybe you can bring over that portable scanner you have, just to see if it’s our mistake or a problem with the card.”

“Portable?” She looked around, her shoulders drawn up even higher and her eyes dark and shifting. “I don’t know what you—”

“Yes. I’ve seen you use it a couple times today. That little backup unit you use? It’s really small and—”

“Never mind, Odessa!” Maxine’s shout cut me off, and Chloe ducked away and hurried back to the safety of her booth. Maxine waved to me to return to our booth, as well. “I finally got it to go through.”

At least we hadn’t had to bother Bernadette. The day was almost over, and we had done well. I squeezed back behind the makeshift counter with Maxine and put my hands on either side of the tiara, ready to slip it off and go back to being just plain old Odessa Pepperdine, the kind of woman that everyone…

“Declined.” Maxine squinted to read the glowing digital words on the small black screen.

“Declined? That can’t be.” Mrs. Davenport seized the small appliance in one hand and yanked it around to see for herself. “It’s a new card. I only used it once before, and that was out here last weekend.”

“It’s probably us,” I jumped in to say. David and I don’t use credit cards, so I didn’t really have any advice to offer. All I could do was try to take the blame myself. It was more than Mrs. Davenport would have done for me, I suspected, so I thought pretty highly of myself for doing it, too.

But the woman did not seem to appreciate my effort to ease her embarrassment one bit. “Something is not right here.”

“Maybe we did it wrong. We’re just filling in for Bernadette, you know.”

“No. Not here.” She pointed to the booth, then made a bigger gesture. “Here. At this flea market.”

She fixed her gaze on Chloe.

I have to confess, that’s right where my own eyes were drawn, as well.

The girl whipped around and suddenly began refilling the sample cups with gooey orange-brown liquid so fast you’d have thought she had a horde clamoring to taste
the stuff. My heart pounded, and not just the way it does when I forget I’m not twenty anymore and try to dash up a flight of stairs. It pounded the way it did when I was a kid playing hide-and-seek and was about to be found out. Or about to find one of my friends and knew I had to run my heart out to tag the tree base and call them out.

Just as she would have been telling the truth when she warned her fellow photo subject that the camera added ten pounds, Mrs. Davenport had spoken the truth. Something was wrong here, and I had a feeling that if Chloe wasn’t a party to it, she knew where the party was.

“I guess all I can do right now is go home and call the company that issued the card and find out what the problem is.” Mrs. Davenport shoved the card back into her wallet. “But somebody really should look into this place.”

“Somebody is looking into it,” I snapped. I don’t usually snap at people, I don’t think, not even the Mrs. Davenports of the world, but this whole thing had me acting not quite myself. I mean, really, I was running a booth in a flea market wearing a tiara and keeping company with people like Sammy the snake and Chloe the…the…the wheat-grass peddler. That didn’t sound like me at all!

“Well, whoever is looking into this place ought to get their eyes checked, is all I can say.” Mrs. Davenport thrust her wallet into her bag, then took one long, sweeping look at every one who had gathered to witness her predicament. “Because something fishy is going on right under their watchful gaze, and they are certainly falling down on the job.”

Yes, when God closes one door, He opens a window. That’s a lovely thing to contemplate. My question is, what do you do when God starts opening windows faster than you can get to them? I’m afraid it’s going to create a back-draft, and before I know it, doors will be slamming all through this house of cards I’ve built trying
not
to meddle in everyone else’s business.

C
hloe Morgan had volunteered to be the first one to sign a petition to close down the Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market. She was the living illustration of the poor little lamb who had lost her way. Bah. Bah.

Bwhahahaha.

That’s how Maxine liked to say it, doing that mad-scientist laugh, all big and sinister-sounding. Well, as sinister as a lovely sixty-something minister’s wife with freckles and far too much Bakelite jewelry could sound.

And I understood her reservations. Really I did. The girl with the weird hair and sweet hair accessories, our Chloe, scared some people. Yes, she had now officially become
our
Chloe. Though Maxine didn’t know it yet.

Our Chloe scared some people. Just as she drew pity from others. And if you paid close enough attention to the folks walking by her booth at the flea market, or even to the narrative of a certain sometimes scaredy-cat minister’s
wife—that’s me, y’all, don’t injure your brain trying to guess anyone else—some people clearly wished they were more like her. But pretty much everyone who saw her couldn’t help but notice that Chloe Morgan was headed in the wrong direction.

When a sheep goes astray, the shepherd goes after it. It’s a lesson that’s clearly spelled out in the Bible, more than once. The shepherd calls and searches and climbs down into gullies and out onto the rocky cliffs to find the lost one and bring it back into the fold. We, with Christ as
our
shepherd, should follow that example. Even if it means we sometimes have to go out on a ledge.

“A tattoo parlor?”

“It’s Chloe’s other job, Maxine. When she’s not working at the flea market on weekends,” I told my friend, who had met me for brunch this Saturday morning and ended up dragged along on an unfolding adventure in search of someone—yet another someone—I thought probably needed our help.

Maxine balked outside the tall and narrow door, painted a sickly deep red probably to stand out in the dingy side alley. Body Art by Abner was painted in large black letters on the narrow panel of glass. Beneath a jagged break patched together with dirty white tape was a list of services and promises of hospitallike skill and cleanliness. “I thought the plan was to get Bernadette a date. We’re not going in here to do that, are we?”

“The plan was to get Bernadette noticed. By Jake. And, by doing that, to give her the opportunity to perhaps,
maybe, one day, if she wanted, go on a date, fall in love, marry and have lots of babies…with Jake.”

Maxine shut her eyes, so tight it made her whole sweet, round face pleat with wrinkles. “You notice how nothing in that whole mess of an explanation contained the words
tattoo parlor
or the names Abner or Chloe?”

“Yes, but we’ve moved on from Bernadette for now, Maxine. We’ve gotten her sort of started on her way, and now it’s time to turn out attention to Chloe.”

“Why? How? When did I agree to this?”

“When you became my friend.” I gave her a hug. “And when Chloe became more than just a surly-faced salesgirl across the aisle from Bernadette’s booth.”

“So you are saying it was inevitable? That my befriending you over our love of Royal Service Hostess Queen partyware put my feet on the path that would eventually lead to us chasing down a young girl in a tattoo parlor?”

“Why are you being so contrary about this, Maxine?”

“Because I don’t remember signing on for any of it.” She had raised her voice in frustration, then instantly, like the well-practiced minister’s wife she was, whipped her head around to see if anyone had heard her losing her cool.

I laughed, because I knew that Maxine wasn’t really all that cool to start with and because I totally understood why she felt she had to guard her every public response. “Don’t bother checking. Nobody we know is going to be hanging around this alley.”

“Except Chloe,” she reminded me.

And I kind of went all gooey then, because I could see that in that instant of looking at our surroundings and thinking of the girl we had wondered about for so long,
Maxine had begun to soften. “I just wish you’d told me where we were headed before we got to the door.”

“Tell you? Why didn’t you ask?” I wriggled my way in between her and the sticky brass doorknob. “When we came away from brunch at the Blue Bonnet and headed directly away from either of our homes, you couldn’t have said something then?”

“I was enjoying the scenery.”

Which she might well have been. The Blue Bonnet Bedand-Breakfast, where we had enjoyed a delicious brunch complete with linen napkins and bone-china teacups, is set on a really lovely piece of land outside town. It’s not too far from where Gloria and Roberto Alvarez—and Roberto’s mama—live, which is considered
the
direction for all future growth of Castlerock. In other words, it is prime real estate. Everyone who goes out that way looks and daydreams just a little about owning some property there.

“But that scenery didn’t last right up until this very second, Maxine.” The time for imagining was long past, and I had to deal with the present and
this
property, where I hoped we’d find some answers. “When we pulled off Magnolia into an alley past a row of Dumpsters by the back entrance to the soup kitchen a block back from here? Not a peep out of you.”

“I’ve served meals at that kitchen dozens of times. It didn’t seem so unusual for us to be near there.”

Again, she had a point. Maxine almost always has a point. I both admire and am annoyed by that very fact at least twice a day. This time, I had to take her point and accept it. This
was
Castlerock, and save a few unsavory bars and questionable neighborhoods, there were few places anyone wouldn’t feel safe.

“Okay, but I still think that if you had an issue with coming here you should have spoken up before I swung the door open and we walked in.”

“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.