The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas by Annie Jones Page B

it.
    Yes, me, who was raised far better than this. I seized the doorknob of somebody else’s home, turned it, opened their door and walked right in.
    In all the years we had shared Christian fellowship, I had never been in the Belmonts’ home. And yet it looked exactly the way I would have expected it to look. Flawless. Nothing fussy or fluffy or fur-bearing in sight. Cool tones of pale aqua and white accented with gleaming unadorned silver. Silver candlesticks on the mantel. Sleek silver-encased photos that looked so perfect, it made me wonder ifshe had hidden her real family’s pictures behind the ones of professional models that came with the frame. A silver tray crowded with medicine bottles, and an empty glass rested on the coffee table.
    A place for everything, and everything in its place. Except the two occupants of the home, of course. I looked at Morty at last, and that’s when I noticed the oversize brown recliner behind him. Definitely out of place. As was the man standing there, his hand curled around a TV remote, his face unshaven and his hair uncombed.
    Poor man. He looked as out of place here as Jan must have sitting on the roof. I blinked, and tears bathed my eyes. My nose tingled. There was a reason I didn’t do this kind of thing, I realized then. It wasn’t because of my personality or my fear of foul odors. It was because…I’m just not any good at it. I’m too tenderhearted. Too empathetic. Too prone to dramatics and blowing things out of proportion and blubbering like a baby over situations that touch my heart and make me just want to—
    “Get out!”
    “Jan!” Gulp. Honestly, I think I actually made a big gulping sound. It’s understandable, when you take a woman on the verge of busting out blubbering and scare her half out of her wits by storming into a room where she…where she, meaning me, has no business being in the first place. Which was why, as soon as I realized how it all must look to Jan, I started trying to explain myself as fast as my tongue could tattle. “I…Morty was standing there. They said somebody has to go up there and knock and the door shall be opened and the door was open, and everyone said, stick your head in…just like cats watching Ping-Pong. And wecouldn’t go around back and holler, even though you were on the roof and—”
    “Stop!” She threw up her hands. She scowled, and not just her regular everyday scowl, either. This one looked like maybe I had given her a first-class headache with all my blathering. Finally, rubbing her temple with one hand, she made a “Go back” motion in the air with the other one and said, “How did you know that? About me being on the roof?”
    “We saw you.”
    “How?” Every last bit of color drained from her face. Even her salon-bought tan seemed to wash away. “How could you see me?”
    “Well, not me. ” I shifted my weight, glanced back at the still-open door, then at Mr. Belmont, who had not moved an inch or changed his expression. “Bernadette and Chloe and Reverend Cordell saw you. From the hot-air balloon.” I threw that last part in, as if it made perfect sense.
    She blinked at me.
    “They’re outside.”
    “In a hot-air balloon?” She almost sounded hopeful, like maybe she thought we had come to whisk her up, up and away. Away from her worry. Away from spotless floors, where everyone trod so lightly it scarcely left a footprint, and fanned-out magazines that no one ever read or touched. Away from her husband and his easy chair and the constant blare of the television set.
    “No, we came in Bernadette’s van. We had been over at the drive-in, to take a tour of the place without any booths or people there. You know, to see what we were dealing with in terms of the layout of things and what kind ofshape everything is really in.” I was babbling again, but at least this time she seemed to follow me. She nodded. Her perfectly plucked eyebrows pinched together above the bridge of her nose. She even