Sadie-In-Waiting by Annie Jones

it hadn’t even crossed his mind.”
    Mary Tate groaned. “Putting you in the most dreaded of all marital situations.”
    “Right. In the wrong .”
    “But you’re not.”
    “I know. I know . He just doesn’t get it.”
    “If he were my husband, he wouldn’t be getting it—not for a long time, I’ll tell you that.”
    “I’m going to get you , Mary Tate. Get you some help.”
    “Oh, please do, sugar. I’ve needed help a very long time now—hopefully in the form of a couple of buff, beautiful cabana boys from a culture where they venerate older women.”
    “What for? You’re married.”
    “Yeah, but I’m not dead .”
    They stopped at the light.
    Sadie shot Mary Tate the finely honed “Don’t make me climb out of my comfort zone to drag you back to the straight and narrow because I’m the mama and you will not prevail with me” look that only a mother of teenagers could rightfully pull off.
    “Oh, sugar, I’m teasing. You know no man alive holds a candle to my Royal.”
    “Holding a candle to Royal?” They hurried across the quiet street. “Isn’t that your job?”
    “You bet. Something needs doing, I just hold that man’s feet to the flame and it gets done ASAP.” Mary Tate laughed, gave the wagon a jerk, and struggled to try to hoist it over the curb.
    “Sap being the operative word?” Sadie muttered under her breath, bending down to lift the back of the wagon and help out her friend.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.” In fifteen years she couldn’t recall ever having seen Royal do anything for his wife that his wife could do for herself. And since Mary Tate could do practically anything…“Can you get the wagon from here on out?”
    “Got it. Let’s go. Looks like Lollie and Waynetta beat us here.” She waved to the women standing in the shade of the park’s lone surviving oak tree.
    Though the official roster listed nearly twenty members of the council mission statement: To unite churches and community through fellowship and service—Sadie had never attended a meeting with more than a dozen women present.
    She expected far fewer than that tonight, and had not really planned a highly organized or particularly coherent agenda.
    So it stood to reason that the first two to arrive would be the town’s self-appointed social maven and the best-intentioned busybody in the county.
    “Hi, Mrs. Muldoon, Mrs. Cummins! Hope y’all haven’t waited long.” Sadie gritted her teeth and prayed she had not just said “y’all” in front of Waynetta Cummins. She had, of course, and a lecture on “People judge us by our words” surely would follow.
    To avoid that and the inevitable looking like a child in front of people she had come to preside over, Sadie slapped on her biggest slopping-sugar expression and settled the cookies on the picnic table. “Please do excuse me a minute, won’t you? I have to run into my office and sign the group in as using the park this evening.”
    Sadie bowed. She bowed . Or maybe it was more of a curtsy. Anyway, her body bobbed up and down, she flung her hands out and stepped backward, all with her teeth bared in a smile that had to have resembled something between the maniacal grimace of a black-and-white movievamp and the glaring high-beam smile of a game-show spokesmodel.
    “Isn’t she too cute?” Mary Tate hugged Lollie and nodded to Waynetta. “ My office. Two whole weeks on the job, and already she talks like a bona fide career woman.”
    If the other women had an opinion about anything from her cuteness to her career, Sadie missed it. She’d already hightailed it away from there, as fast as her stubby little middle-aged legs could carry her.

Chapter Seven
    “Y ou’d better get back out there, sugar.” Mary Tate bounded into Sadie’s office with a cookie in one hand and a can of soda in the other. “Deborah Danes just swooped down on the group with an idea for our fall service project. She outlined it, made color computer printouts and stuffed them