Judge Not

by Ann Miller Hopkins

Overview

In this hilarious, coming of age again novel, set in the eighties, Abby Copenhaven is a forty-nine-year-old Southern, former beauty queen, writer, and pageant judge. Throughout her crazy predicaments on the rural pageant circuit, she makes everything into an omen to change her life. The contestants are an endless supply of material for her comic sarcasm. Anecdotes of former pageant years provide a glimpse into a less secure and more complicated Abby. People she has loved along the way raise her expectations in life. Francine, a Sea Island woman who speaks Gullah, and Bernice, a retired rodeo rider, add to her understanding of those outside the shallow beauty arena. Still, her favorite companion is a Bernese Mountain dog, her buffer against the outside world. When she meets charismatic Texas attorney, Tom Ross, he confuses her search for omens with an electric physical attraction neither has felt before. But once her critical juices start flowing, Abby finds it hard to stop judging and embrace a love and life she could never have imagined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781546220077
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

"Judge not, that you be not judged." Matthew 7:1

Judging always brings out the bitch in me. It's a gene, and I have all the markers. I also read omens. Being able to read omens is not genetic, but a gift. Almost everything is a sign pointing to what is about to happen. A broken cup, the same song on two radio stations or a race horse with your daddy's name might mean something. Sometimes you have to look squint-eyed to see an omen, but it is there. It seemed too easy to set aside this weekend to judge a small, rural beauty pageant, an offer I would normally reject. Hungry for a change, I made a watermelon festival into an omen. How desperate am I? Being forty-nine and single chipped away at my options for every weekend, but this was too smooth. Usually, a fi ght ending in bargaining with my editor for time to travel to a pageant, preceded accepting a request to judge.

Ida, the magazine editor's receptionist and my stand-by for keeping V, my Bernese Mountain dog, started the series of events that channeled me here.

"Our club is planning a camp-out this weekend in the North Carolina mountains, near Cashiers. There's a class on hiking with your dog. Everybody is taking a dog. Please let me have V. You know I'm like her step-mother," Ida begged in a late-night phone call.

"Of course, you can take her. She probably needs an adventure."

I envied the camaraderie in Ida's elite group of young women. It was as real as their prowess at anything they undertook. Her little circle dominated fund raiser runs, bike races and tennis tournaments. They double-slapped palms and chanted "Gotcha back, girl," when they won an event. There was more to the club, something that made it solid, but I was not sure what.

The next morning, before I could respond to the judging request letter, punctuated with white-out, Ida leaned on my desk and mentioned I had no article deadlines that week. She alone was privy to the editor's convoluted calendar. She was privy to almost everything in the magazine office. She knew when the men's room was out of paper.

As I worked on interpreting the omen of having a rare space between article deadlines, Claude Copenhaven showed up at the office, looking older and duller than my mind's eye remembered. He had a paunch and needed a haircut. I had rarely seen him since our messy divorce was final. His sudden appearance was a definite omen. He wanted something.

Ida scurried back to her receptionist desk. She made a gagging gesture behind Claude's back.

"Hello, Abby. You're looking as beautiful as ever."

"What do you want?"

"I want to buy the river cottage from you," he said, trying to appear casual.

"Not for sale," I said, sitting back down at my small desk. He had to know how much I loved that little house, shaded by a limestone bluff on the Tennessee River, sadistic bastard. I had wrapped myself in a crazy quilt on its screened porch and watched the river to stay sane while Claude and the Alabama Courts carved away twenty-five years of gathering from my life.

"I'd like the cottage to be a family place, again," he said.

Whose family, your girlfriend's?" I asked, and stacked papers to avoid eye contact. Our divorce was final in 1982. Three years later, it was still awkward to be in the same room with him.

"The girls seem to like her," he said to inflame my resentment at our grown daughters tolerating his old secretary, now significant other.

"Sarah tells me you have another dog. You always did love the big ones. Does she stay home while you work? Is she at home now?" Claude's tone was threatening. "You have to be very careful with a big dog." He was smiling, looking hard into my eyes.

"You son of a bitch, you backed over Louise in our driveway. It wasn't my fault." I swallowed tears at the mention of that sweet, old dog. Claude had not forgotten how to hurt me. "You don't have enough money to buy my river house," I said too loudly.

"I don't know, the real estate business has been very good lately." Claude was wealthy. I was not. He smiled and tried to look cool. He had never been good at it.

"Let me explain it to you. There's not that much money. Get out."

At 5:30, I closed a file with garden photos being considered for next February's issue, and walked to my car. A note on yellow paper was wedged under the windshield wiper. I smiled, remembering my college sweetheart. He had left a note on my windshield, asking me for a date after a football game. I was thrilled and kept the note until he married someone else. We women are a foolish breed.

Use good judgement. Your house is not safe.

Texas still has outlaws.

How dare Claude threaten me? was my first thought. The Texas comment was puzzling. The paper was lined, but the note was typed. I felt like Nancy Drew.

"Mind, how you do go on," I whispered and hurried home to V.

I named her Velcro as a puppy. It felt awkward to yell Velcro, so she became V. Even then, she was busy herding me, being the buffer between me and the world. That's what Bernese Mountain dogs do. Now, at three years old and one hundred pounds, she did not endure boarding happily. I was grateful for Ida.

Good omens or bad, the signs pointed me here. And here I am, judging a beauty pageant in Cottondale, Florida. I am looking hard for the thing that will change my life. Here? What's wrong with me? The beauty contestants' interviews had begun.

I flipped a glossy photo over and pulled a score sheet from a folder with a paper watermelon glued to the corner. "26th Annual Watermelon Festival, 1985" was scrawled in homemade calligraphy. I judged the young, suntanned woman next to me, just to stay in practice. My old friend Nelle Ashford and I had made her chairperson on our unceremonious arrival to Florida and she had taken it to heart.

"How they gonna hope for a winner in Houston if we don't weed 'em out down here?" Tamsey Pike, the Mississippi judge who had joined us, leaned her full bosom forward, trying to read my notes. Her dangling earrings made a tink tink that irritated me almost as much as her audible sucking on a life saver. Tamsey was only twenty-nine, but looked older. Too many disappointments and cigarettes had taken a toll on a once beautiful woman. My almost fifty-year-old face held up pretty well next to hers, I thought. But then, I don't tan my hide.

"Don't look." I whispered and slid the edge of the interview folder over the score sheet of the first contestant, Anna Livingston.

Agnes Peabody, a teenaged pageant aide, led contestant number two into a windowless room in an unused section of the North Florida Agricultural Building. Everything in the structure, built in the fifties, was some shade of green. A humming air conditioner in the wall provided background music for our interview room.

If I had been in charge of our surroundings, there would have been a tall, Chinoiserie screen behind us. Judges would have been seated in three French arm chairs behind an eight-foot carved walnut table. The contestant being interviewed across from the judges would have sat on a graceful Bergere chair. Put that chair on a Persian rug and the whole cold process in the room would have been elevated and refined, successfully fending off the hospital green of the space. But, in this pageant or my life, I was not in charge.

Our second contestant was Sylvia Zorn from LaGrange, Georgia. She entered the low-ceilinged room with a rolling runway gait. Tall and thin, she was plain. Her thick, chestnut hair was short and swept to one side. From her minimal smile and absence of anxiousness or excitement, I felt her involvement in the pageant was at the request of someone else.

She pulled her seafoam green linen jacket down over a slender sheath of the same fabric. Only pearls punctuated the long, green silhouette in the chair.

"We have family in LaGrange," Nelle began. "Do you know the Langdales?"

"Everyone knows the Langdales. They practically own LaGrange. My grandmother on my mother's side was a Langdale," Sylvia answered.

"Mine, too." Nelle was excited.

The girl was not.

"Maybe we're cousins." Nelle laughed alone and then changed the subject. "I see you are at Valdosta State. What are you studying?"

"Science. I plan to transfer to pharmacy school at Auburn." Even the small smile was gone now.

"That's wonderful," I said to raise the energy level in our dull, AC-humming room.

"My father thinks so."

"Oh, is he a pharmacist?" Work with me here, I thought.

"No. He wants me to be one."

What's the best book you've ever read?" Tamsey jumped in, using the list of suggested questions attached to our score sheets.

Nelle and I preferred our own tried and true questions.

"Really, any science fiction, The Martian Chronicles or anything by Ray Bradbury."

"Makes you look at your own world with new eyes, doesn't it?" Nelle interjected, more than asked. The ex-English teacher surfaced in Nelle, and I kept score. I require my brain to keep score in several categories. A game within the game keeps me from getting stupid during these interviews.

"Yes. It's like reading poetry that shows how shallow our race, our society is," Sylvia Zorn said.

Her eyes looked older than her eighteen years and somehow sad. High cheek bones and long face gave her a serious expression that begged to be photographed at close range.

"Give the audience a big smile on that stage tonight, Sylvia," Tamsey said as a dismissal.

"I'll do my best," she said and added a weak smile as an after-thought.

"I'm afraid that girl is depressed," Nelle said when the tall contestant was gone.

"We're not therapists, we're judges," Tamsey said. "We judge, not counsel."

A folding metal chair, sadistically isolated across from our long table, set the scene for our meeting with contestant number three, a pale nineteen-year-old girl with a fixed smile.

"I'm Tonya Ray," she said, looking at each of us for a sharp, timed moment, as instructed, I presumed.

Tonya, Tamsey, where did people get such names? Their mothers must have read the same grocery store romance novels.

Nelle's slow blink let me know she had registered the names as well.

Nelle Ashford had been on the beauty pageant circuit longer than almost anyone. She drove from Savannah to ask her interview questions. Her hair, skin, suit and lipstick were beige, but her questions were always colorful.

"What is your favorite color, Tonya?"

Dramatic pause, lavender lids closed in deep thought, "Ra-id," she finally responded.

"I'm blind. Describe red to me." Nelle folded her sheet and plump arms and leaned back in her chair.

Oh, how my old friend Nelle loved that question. I'd heard it from Blakely, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. She was all but famous for it.

Tonya's penciled eyebrows, I noted on my sheet's margin, were too close to her eyes, and gave her otherwise beautiful face a snaky look. "It's hot and bright and bulls don't like it." She laughed at her own cleverness.

Thin top lip. I jotted down this additional reptilian feature, not simply as idle criticism, but for future identification, like a cow's ear tag. OK, too crass, even for me. Pretty, Southern agriculture queens tend to blend after a while. Side notes are necessary. I doodled a long snake on the score sheet. The first of many relevant drawings.

My turn. I pride myself on posing questions in a relaxed, conversational tone. I use my fake mellow voice to seem particularly refined. I have looked refined since I was twelve, but I only mastered the voice at twenty.

I label this voice-over a latent camouflage gene. Like sweet butter spread over tart critical juices, the voice allows an interview to continue long after the girl is history.

"In ten years, if you run into an old friend who asks what you are doing, what would you like to be able to tell her?" I asked.

"That I was a model, livin' in New York, in a penthouse." She needed no time to think that one through. She blinked rapidly. I hoped she wasn't going to strike.

I read on her entry form she had taken modeling in Donaldsonville, Georgia. I wondered if she knew what a penthouse was.

"It's what's on the inside that counts," Tonya blurted.

"Did I miss a question?" Nelle whispered. Poor Nelle had no discernable bitch markers.

The girl was done, without knowing it. Nelle and I watched her eyes light on Tamsey's jewelry. The kind that only second wives have. The girl was still too young to recognize the flashy designs not worn by those who collect pieces through anniversaries and inheritances.

"What is the single best thing about your generation?" Tamsey gestured with her large hands as she spoke. Her rings caught the light and threatened to distract.

"That we are not prejudiced about people, but accept them for what they're worth. I mean if they are black or women or anything, it don't matter."

I saw Nelle cringe. The girl was doomed in the eyes of an ex-English teacher.

I added that to my teacher column tally.

"Thank you, Tonya." Tamsey's job was to dismiss when we were about to laugh, cry or throw up.

We were allowed less than five minutes between each contestant. That was enough time to share our reactions, make notes, or convince each other why a girl would or would not be able to compete with other Ag Queens around the country. We knew the polished Houston, Dallas, Memphis and Jackson girls loomed, poised and smiling, ready to compete in the big Texas pageant with our winner.

"Well, she's nothing like her pictures," Tamsey said the moment the door closed.

"She's at FSU now. That's probably a high school picture," Nelle said.

"I think it's her hair. I don't think that's the wholesome look we want. Do you?" Tamsey spoke in my direction.

She obviously had not attended the National Ag Festival, an extravaganza on every level. I could not respond and look at Tamsey's black, patent-leather hair at the same time, so I shifted topics.

"She doesn't seem very bright. The girl we pick will have to think on her feet to promote watermelons." I laughed and Nelle laughed like a child with me. Tamsey looked blankly at us, pressing her outlined lips tightly together. She never laughed.

We looked at Tamsey, an undisguised, gaudy, second wife with diamond encrusted pinky rings. Both hands testified to her new initials.

"In case the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing," I had said to Nelle when we met Tamsey a few hours earlier.

Pageant director Merle Holt introduced Tamsey as a god-sent. Mississippi Beauty queens are hard to come by in North Florida.

"The girl's not a winner on the national level. Let's get off her and on with these interviews." Tamsey pulled out contestant number four's sheet to bury the hopes of number three, who was, even as we spoke, probably saying a secret prayer.

"Ladies, here is contestant number four," Agnes announced. She winked at the taller girl she introduced and then at us before she slowly closed the door. This was the closest she would ever be to a beauty pageant.

Agnes was victim to the same powerful osmosis that creates band roadies and sports volunteers, eager to clean and store equipment. Being a part of something dreams are made of seeps into the emotions of those who would otherwise only be in the audience, the wings or the sidelines.

In this little pageant, she was the link between stage and director, judges and dressing room. Her movements were busier than necessary, shuffling papers, adjusting chairs, even touching a wayward strand of hair on a future queen.

Tonight, she would hold the trophy and roses back stage. Agnes Peabody had practiced handing off the trophy in her bedroom mirror with a large Pine Sol bottle for weeks. Her real treasures, a tiara and a trophy, stolen two pageants ago, were under her bed.

What great fortune to be the next-door neighbor of the director, Merle Holt.

"I'm Daphne Lee Stone." The girl sat gracefully in the lone folding chair and crossed her ankles to one side. Her fingers were long and relaxed in her lap. I had a feeling she came to win.

Favorite novel line on the entry form: Gone with the Wind. Nelle and I spied it at the same time.

"Who is Margret Mitchell?" Nelle beat me to the draw.

Tamsey looked annoyed and picked a lump of mascara from her long lashes.

"She wrote Gone with the Wind. I wish she had lived to write more. Wouldn't you love to know what happened to Scarlet and Rhett?"

"Yes, yes I would." Tamsey came to the rescue. "You're from Albany. What's the most beautiful thing about your city?"

"I'd have to say the Flint River." She spoke softly, allowing the words to sound like a lazy stream. There was no mistaking she was Southern, but the drawl was softened around the edges with education and travel.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Judge Not"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ann Miller Hopkins.
Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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