Tea with Jam and Dread by Tamar Myers Page A

bragged on my blog, I tweeted, I wrote about it in my church newsletter, and you
can
expect
Good Morning Pittsburgh
,
Special Edition
to show up here tomorrow at ten.’
    ‘Jolly good,’ Sebastian said with a grin. ‘I’ve never been on the telly before.’
    ‘Mother,’ Celia said, ‘will you help me fix my hair? That adapter for my hairdryer better bloody well work, or – or—’
    ‘Or what, dear?’ Aubrey asked sweetly.
    ‘Or else!’
    Aubrey turned her gentle gaze on me. ‘Magdalena, just in case, do you have a hairdryer that we might borrow? They don’t seem to come with the rooms.’
    I smiled, eager to help. ‘Yes and no. I don’t have any fancy-schmancy electric hairdyers, if that’s what you need, but since you are here to experience the old-fashioned ways, why not use the Amish hairdryer?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ Aubrey said.
    ‘She means the sun,’ Agnes snapped.
    ‘
Tres amusant
,’ Sebastian said.
    ‘Sarcasm does not become you, dear,’ I said graciously. ‘And I wasn’t being facetious about using the sun to dry your hair. Just slather on sunscreen and then take a folding chair out into the driveway about nine in the morning. Your hair will be dry in twenty minutes. That will leave you plenty of time to finish getting dressed, Celia, especially if you wise up and leave all that other gunk off your face. Too much black around your eyes makes you look like a raccoon – either that or a nineteenth-century bank robber.’
    ‘I say there!’ Celia said, rearing back like a startled colt.
    Aubrey’s laugh brought to mind tiny crystal bells. ‘Magdalena, you are so refreshing – in that American sort of way.’
    ‘She means “rude,”’ Agnes said.
    ‘Nonsense,’ Aubrey said. ‘But rally, shouldn’t we be putting more thought into searching for Peregrine? According to the research that I did before coming here, there are bears in these woods, and animals called coyotes. No offense to you Americans, but it seems as if everyone here has a gun, and if someone looks at someone else just a wee bit wonky … Well, I’m just saying that Peregrine wandering around the woods late at night might well appear to be threatening.’
    ‘It’s that d— monocle,’ Sebastian said. ‘He won’t listen to reason and get a proper pair of specs.’ Sebastian actually said a four letter word, which I refuse to repeat!
    At that moment my hero burst through the swinging kitchen doors like the sheriff in an old-timey saloon. ‘No need to stress yourselves further, folks.
Missing
Peregrine is no longer missing! He is safe, if not sound of mind, and shall return here momentarily.’
    Then, lo and behold, the doorbell rang.

EIGHT
    ‘N o proselytising here,’ I said when I saw who was standing on my veranda. I started to close the door.
    For the record, I knew ding-dong well that the waist-high woman in a nun’s habit was Gabe’s Jewish mother. Standing next to her, looking a bit chagrined, was the heretofore missing Peregrine. For the record, Gabe’s mother’s birth name was Ida, but her spiritual name was Mother Malaise. She was the founder and self-appointed head of a made-up religion called the Sisters of Apathy. These so-called nuns were cloistered in a convent that had been converted from a farmhouse that was located directly across the road from the PennDutch.
    Although she has vehemently denied it on many occasions, Mother Malaise had created her cult for the sole purpose of causing her Jewish son to feel guilty for having taken a Christian wife. It began as a way of showing her son how broken-hearted she was that he had abandoned four thousand years of tradition to marry a
shikse –
which is a not very nice way of say ‘a gentile woman.’ However, Gabe has never felt guilty about anything, and since he couldn’t even bring himself to
act
guilty, things quickly went downhill from there.
    Soon Ida, aka Mother Malaise, invented the bizarre theology of disparagement. This consists of one