cover it. Dang! That wouldn’t work. Camille had thoroughly convinced Sheryl that her phantom cat needed extra TLC. Trying to come in early or stay later now would bust the tall tale.
Selling twenty CDs in front of the beauty supply might work, if the bootleg DVD man didn’t chase her off his turf. Or maybe she could work a week at a retail store. If she hadn’t burned her relationship with her Mary Kay director, she might be able to host a few shows.
Ugh! Why don’t police officers think about how they’re messing with people’s lives when they write these tickets?
No matter what, she’d have to add to her forty-hour work week for a while to keep this thing from escalating to a warrant. Yet, even with a payment plan, there was nothing to spare in her budget.
Maybe she should just get pregnant and have a baby so she could get free food, reduced rent, and a small fortune every tax season. She’d always wanted a daughter. A little diva named Madison. Camille snuggled back into her couch at the thought of her mini-me. Would she be a prissy mama or one of those tree-climbing, frog-catching tomboys? Would she inherit her mother’s voice and her grandmother’s instrumental talent?
Then there was always the possibility little Madison would be a complete horror. Drawing on walls, fighting at school so Camille would have to come off her job to attend parent conferences. And what if Madison grew up to be a serial killer? The world would have one more lunatic on the streets all because Camille Robertson couldn’t get one big break. They’d blame Camille, and she’d blame John David.
Snap out of it!
Camille placed a hand on her forehead. The whole kid scheme was crazy, but she had to do something. She couldn’t live the rest of her life in a state where two hundred dollars threw her into panic mode. No matter what, she had to work her way out of this. There was no easy path.
And then it hit her. If she was going to put herself to work doing something she didn’t really want to do—like give birth—she might as well work for something she did want. Seriously, if she was willing to raise a child, she should at least be willing to join a choir and lead a few songs.
John David had said that if she did her part, he’d do his. That probably wouldn’t help her in the short term with this ticket, but something had to give.
The counsel Jerdine gave her daughter about her first job working at McDonald’s came to mind. Camille had been complaining about having to clean the men’s restroom. “It’s so nasty!”
“Well”—her mother had laughed—“they kick the men out before you go in, right?”
“Yes,” Camille conceded while buckling her seat belt.
Jerdine was always on time to pick up her daughter. She never wanted any of Camille’s male coworkers offering her shapely daughter a ride home.
“Baby, sometimes you have to do what you have to do first in order to do what you want to do later,” Jerdine comforted her only daughter.
Camille sat straight up on her couch now. She closed her eyes and spoke into the air. “Okay, Momma. I know you didn’t mean for me to use your advice in a bad way, but you also said that God lets everything happen for a reason.
“I don’t know all the reasons, but I’ve got to go for it. Singing won’t go away, Momma. I have to do this.”
CHAPTER 7
Hours at the Medgar Evers center yielded a list of the top-ten churches in the Dallas area, by enrollment. The King’s Table, pastored by a man who was probably a household name at that point, ranked number one, with a combined total of twenty-four thousand in attendance at its two Sunday services. Camille scoffed at the idea of attending church twice on a Sunday. If memory served her well, she could barely keep her eyelids apart during the main message every week. And Wednesday night services were even worse with Mother Jackson beating that tambourine all offbeat.
Second on her list was Northeast Christian Church. Nineteen thousand. One service. But from what Camille gathered on the Web site, the congregation was mostly Caucasian. She’d send John David a text: Does the church have to be black?
His reply: Yes
Camille: Think Kirk Franklin. He crosses over races.
John David: HE’S A MAN
Okay, you don’t have to holler. Camille X-ed Northeast off the list.
Next up, Grace Chapel Community Church. They had only fifteen thousand people coming every week. Camille did the math. If fifteen thousand people bought one of her CDs at thirteen ninety-nine each, she’d make only about seventeen thousand dollars after John David took his cut. Barely above full-time minimum wage, annually. Surely, she’d have more than fifteen thousand people buying her music, but the home base needed to be at least twenty thousand to move her into a new tax bracket.
With The King’s Table, she could at least hope to bring home close to thirty thousand dollars with each release.
After having performed her calculations, there was no way on earth she could join a church with less than twenty thousand members who actually came to church.
The King’s Table it is.
Sunday morning, Camille flicked through the clothes in her closet, looking for something eye-catching to commemorate her walk down the main aisle when she joined the church. No time like the present to start making an impression on the congregation. She selected a black shirt dress with four-inch open-toed, shiny black pumps. Cleaver-ish, yet stylish enough to cause some degree of speculation about her income bracket. The front lace wig would have been over the top, so she decided to sport a sophisticated, black ponytail that bobbed just a little with every step.
Those pumps, however, proved to be a total nightmare. Camille had underestimated how far she’d have to walk from her parking space to a trolley pick-up stop. Even after the driver cleared the vehicle at the front entrance, she still had to walk up another flight of stairs in a swarm of people who obviously had no respect for corns.
Once she passed through the arenalike doors into one of the main seating areas, Camille gasped at the sheer magnitude of the sanctuary. The Web site photographs didn’t do this church justice. Oh my God! This place is crazy! It might as well have been a rock concert, except rock fans wouldn’t assemble themselves at eight o’clock in the morning no matter how famous the singer. Shoot, I don’t even get to work this early!
Rows and rows, columns and columns of people with Bibles, hats, and notepads found their seats next to fellow members and, presumably, a number of visitors. Though the cushioned seats were covered with bright red cloth, few of them remained visible. The church was nearly packed except for the nosebleed seats, and service hadn’t even begun.
An usher escorted Camille’s bunch of church-goers to one of the last empty sections in the building. She sat next to a woman who’d been smart enough to bring a jacket. And a Bible, which Camille didn’t own, but she’d put that on her list of things to get. She’d have to ask John David if she could write it off as a business expense.
Camille’s feet had barely recovered when some old man dressed in African attire approached center stage with a huge horn-looking device the size of a five-year-old child. He raised the instrument to his lips and blew. The all-encompassing sound was followed by a rousing, almost deafening praise from the congregation. These people obviously had supernatural lung capacity.
He blew again, and another round of praise circled through the building. By this time, everyone was standing. Camille refused to stuff her feet into those shoes again. The people sitting on either side of her probably didn’t matter one way or another as far as her music was concerned. No worries. She’d let those heels rest until her debut church-joining waltz toward the main platform.
After the call to worship, five people walked out with microphones in hand, and lights hit the band as well as the robed choir behind them. The audience applauded as a man Camille guessed was the worship leader, a heavy, bald-headed guy dressed in a traditional