LITMIR.BIZ

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16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Chapter 36

      Chapter 37

      Chapter 38

      Chapter 39

      Chapter 40

      Epilogue

      A Reading Group Guide

      Discussion Questions

      A Q&A with Pat G’Orge-Walker

      Prologue

      It was 2005 and in the town of Pelzer, South Carolina, during the month of June, weddings sprang up faster than gas prices.

      It seemed that bouts of desperation had taken over the many physically and mentally challenged who seemed destined to remain unmarried. The why and how of the sudden marital surge was a mystery, except to those who were getting married. They didn’t care why, and for the most part, really didn’t care how.

      However, most of the other town folks, tired of boredom, were happy to have something to celebrate. And, of course, having plenty of free food to eat on Saturdays when no one wanted to cook at home, in all the heat, was always a good thing.

      There were a few of the folks not happy for the newlyweds. They were the just-couldn’t-get-a-man-to-save-their-lives members of the Oh Lawd, Why Am I Still Single Singles Club. Those women had never so much as received an obscene phone call let alone a marriage proposal. But for propriety’s sake, they tried to keep their opinions quiet, preferring to gripe among themselves.

      They indulged and wallowed in self-pity. Their unhappiness didn’t bother the other Pelzer residents until there was one wedding that finally sent them over the edge. They could stand it no more.

      The beginning of their push for freedom from unmarried misery began when suddenly one of their former members, Sheila Shame, got a man.

      Fifty-year-old Sheila with chronic post-nasal drip, and one of the worst church soloists in the “A” choir history, announced she was getting married. Before folks could recover from her news, a flood of other wedding invitations poured into mailboxes all around town.

      The wedding deluge spread out over several gorgeous sunny Saturday afternoons. The first one, which was Sheila’s, started like something straight out of a Disney movie. There were colorful birds chirping, smiling bees buzzing, and it was all for a woman no one thought they’d live to see walk down the aisle.

      There was standing room only when Sheila married Pookie Bowser at an IHOP Restaurant. Sheila could barely control her joy at her good fortune. She grinned and cried endlessly at the altar, causing her makeup to smudge all around her bulging brown eyes. She stood at that altar looking like Pookie had given her a shiner. But before their “I do’s,” Sheila boasted to her guests.

      “Y’all didn’t think I could get a man, but I did,” Sheila gushed, causing her makeup to spread and making her look like she wore a half-mask. To further her point, she turned and snapped her fingers at the guests.

      Pookie quickly snatched Sheila’s burqa-shaped veil and covered her pimply face before he changed his mind.

      Although they wanted to laugh, the guests could do nothing but nod in agreement. Some did bother to cover their mouths and muffle a snicker as Sheila stood, slightly askew, on her one leg hidden by her extravagant, long, off-white gown. And, with a quick shout of “Thank you, Jesus. I sure do,” when asked if she’d take Pookie, Sheila grabbed and leaned on her new husband.

      Pookie, on the other hand, was elated because he finally had a chance to get his bucked and crooked teeth fixed. Sheila had both dental and medical benefits. The image of his name on an insurance card made Pookie scream out in joy, “Hallelujah.”

      Although Sheila and Pookie’s marriage was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the singles group, they weren’t the only unlikely pair to wed that month.

      There was Sister Patty Cake, the eighty-year-old, reed-thin co-chair of the Senior Choir. She had celery-colored teeth and breath so bad she could peel paint off a wall. She married a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican man nicknamed Kool Aid. He had dreadlocks that flowed like branches from his head. When folks tried to warn her that her soon-to-be husband was only marrying her to get a green card, Patty didn’t listen or care. Having never been married, she was so happy she gave him a matching green American Express card. Whatever he did to her on their wedding night pleased her, because even though he left the following morning, she continued to send him a weekly check. And she was happy to do it.

      There were others. Southside Annie was forty with arthritis so bad she couldn’t thread a needle, but she snagged her a man. She married a thug named Klepto from the north side. They married quickly because he was only out on temporary parole. She declared she didn’t mind conjugal visits. And then there was Two-Ton Sally who married a fella from Alabama named Big Louie. He was about three times smaller than Sally. Despite the odds, those women had snagged husbands.

      After that last wedding, which the members of the Oh Lawd, Why Am I Still Single group took as a slap in the face, they became downright shameless and, of course, even more desperate. They perpetrated daily sunrise jogging sprints. They sported natty but expensive hair weaves that were neon-colored. They even enrolled in “nouvelle cuisine” cooking classes. There wasn’t a ploy or a trick that was off-limits.

      None of their schemes worked. Since it was still early in July and they weren’t willing to give up their manhunt, they decided to try something new. They would open the door to new membership.

      They didn’t have to wait long after the call out to the lonely and desperate before someone answered.

      That next Saturday was their first meeting for new members. As always, Sister Need Sum held the meeting at her house as she had since the group’s beginning. It was at that meeting that they welcomed into their chaotic mix the group’s first caucasian member, Sister Birdie Tweet.

      None of the members suspected that Birdie’s huge heart and even larger overflowing bank account would catapult them into a journey that they were ill prepared to take.

      Moreover, the women went to new heights to prove that desperation creates strange bedfellows when they also welcomed a former ex-con and current memory-challenged member of their church’s Mothers Board, Mother Bea Blister.

      There was a little more than a month left of summertime, and there wasn’t any time to waste.

      Desperation made these women act crazier than a swarm of intoxicated butterflies stumbling for ten miles, instead of flying. They were just that lost.

      1

      “Do you think this old gas-guzzling clunker can go a little faster?” Cill asked, impatient and loud as she leaned towards the steering wheel of the 1993 red Camry from her seat on the passenger side.

      Cill and her childhood friend, Petunia, had just left the wedding reception for a fifty-year-old woman with an oversized glass eye, nicknamed Blind Betty.

      Blind Betty had landed a wealthy real estate mogul who, for reasons no one could understand, had

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