THE KING MAKER

THE KING MAKER

Chapter 1— CORONATION

First wives typically go quietly. I’ve watched them slink away over the years. I’ve witnessed first ladies’ chairs go empty only to be filled six months later with another and then another and another. Even as a child, I wondered what happened to the first of them. The one who went so quietly to tend their children. The one who no longer wore the rhinestone hats on the front pew.

The king maker herself. Where is she?

I watched her final slow walk down the church aisle. I saw her final goodbyes to the kingdom that she built. The doors slammed loud behind her, and her chair was cycled through like carbon in the atmosphere—over and over and over until no one remembered she’d sat there first.

But a real king maker knows when she’s no longer welcome in her own kingdom. She exited with dignity and grace. I saw her as a child and then a teen and then a woman in my own right. I revered her for surrendering the power she grew with her own hands. I honored her for walking away from the beautiful field she’d planted seed by seed. I loved her for choosing a small and healthy life for her children over opulence and abundance, even if her fingerprints were cemented in every nook and cranny.

She always deserved better. Everyone in the congregation knew it, but her presence made their church experience awkward. She was expendable to them. Easily tossed aside. And so, the church went forward. Welcoming brand-new shining ladies in and dusting off the crown the king maker left behind in her hast.

Her name was Helen or Mrs. Helen or Miss Helen or Mother Helen in the end. She died last year. She died quietly and no one ever knew how she felt about it all.

There were twelve of us at her wake. It was calm and lovely, just like Mother Helen always maintained herself to be. No one from the now mega-church attended the ceremony except for me. The rest of the attendants were her two children who also revered her, and her book club.

That’s what came of her life. Or so I thought…

A tiny tap on my shoulder as we exited the chapel. I turned and had to look all the way down to see that the tap came from a barely five-feet-tall elderly member of Mother Helen’s book club. She smiled with her whole face and reached deep into the leather satchel that hung on her shoulder.

“You’re Juri?” she asked me, still grinning widely.

“Yes, Ma’am,” I replied.

“Helen wanted you to have this,” she said with a mischievous wink.

She held a leatherbound journal in her steady hands. When I didn’t take the journal immediately, she nudged me with it.

“Specific instruction to give this to you today,” she told me. “Take it or I won’t be a woman of my word to my dead best friend.”

I nodded and gently took the journal from her hands. I opened it to the first page, expecting a typical dated journal entry, but instead, there was a recipe.

RECIPE FOR A KING

Ingredients

·      A gullible dumb twenty-something male

·       Delusional compliments i.e lies

·      Sex (know that it will be bad, you must be okay with that)

·      Chocolate chip cookies

·      2% Milk (substitute for soy because his gas will smell like roadkill)

·      The power to let power go

Mix it all together for the first ten years. Let him rise. He will triple in size as you lift him up, but then he will grow legs and leave you behind. Do not react! This is part of the rising process.

The rest of this recipe is in the journal I’m gifting you, Juri. Why have I chosen to give you this? I’ve watched you wondered after me all these years. I know I may look like a pitiful woman who never put up a valiant fight but am a writer. I am a mother. I am a gardener. And I longed for a simple life. But as a thank you for never letting me slip your mind, here is my life story. Do with it what you please.