The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two

by Blair, Danielle

  “No love is perfect. Before long, it’s dirty shorts on the floor and a dropped kiss that used to happen at the same time each day and talking in bed about the distractions of life instead of distracting each other from life.” Charlotte tried to summon that long-ago day in the July sun—the way the freshly-plowed dust had tickled her nose, the way Nash’s crooked smile had tickled just about everything else, but it was a film reel from another time, something that had once happened to someone else.

  “Charlotte?” Rebekkah whispered. “Is everything okay?”

  Charlotte’s awareness circled around again. Veins at her temples, thick with want of memories, carried the burden of a long day. Her tongue was gross with syrupy scotch, and she wanted to go home. Home, home.

  “That best friend of yours? Take care of him and you’ll be fine.”

  An hour past close, Charlotte climbed behind the wheel of her minivan and pulled an old red bandana from her pocket. She pressed it to her nose and closed her eyes. Somewhere in the distant reaches of her sensory memory, Nash was there, just as he had always been.

  He just seemed further away than ever.

  * * *

  Since the beginning of their tumultuous relationship, he had been fickle. Pecans, shelled or unshelled, from the hand were his preference. Or lizards, preferably dead, but Charlotte wasn’t about to platter that delicacy in her palm simply for the payoff of being permitted inside his selective personal bubble. It had taken nearly two years, building on prior trust, for him to try to seduce her. Theirs was an unconventional love, human to ostrich and back again, but every single night since Charlotte had moved back home, she’d snuck over to the farm’s higher side fence to feed Tibbs the ostrich. In return, he would flap his wings, cop a squat, and start a side to side breakdance move with his neck that sounded a bit like knocking on a hollow door.

  Tibbs’ mating dance was legendary. Tourists heard about the ostrich’s mating prowess and pulled off on their little side road as a kind of litmus test of sexuality. Men, grannies, German shepherds, Tibbs did not discriminate. Some people had it. Some didn’t. Charlotte, though, had it in spades. It never failed to make her laugh and give her a pocket of peace in an otherwise hectic day. Lately, Charlotte needed a little more of that.

  Tibbs had just made it to the bottom of his feed bucket when Charlotte heard the soggy switchgrass rearrange behind her. She knew by the unhurried cadence, the length of the strides, the drizzle that washed his scent clear through the night air, that it was Nash.

  “Bastard hadn’t eaten in days. Should’a known.”

  Nash’s affectionate nickname stemmed from the fact that, heterosexual or not, Tibbs had never once found him attractive. Ostrich must have been deprived of oxygen at birth to think that. Squinting as he was against the light rain, his hair darkening as it took on water, as impervious to the elements as a man got, even more so. Somehow, Charlotte had known Nash would come, rain or not. She found that, through intuition or sense, she could predict his behavior almost before he knew it. What she couldn’t predict was whether Nash had found a little room in his world to allow Charlotte to become a bigger, better version of herself.

  “How’s Milkshake?”

  “Weighing her a good bit. Checking on her every four to six hours.”

  “Is she close?”

  “Hard to say. You always took her pelvic measurements.”

  “Black spot on her back was always a good guide.” Charlotte hung the feed pail on a nail in the fence and tugged the hood of her raincoat closer to her brow. “Gabe?”

  “He’s fine. Staying up too late with his nose in a book. Missing his mom.”

  If Charlotte were keeping count, Nash was up to two not-so-subtle hints to call a truce, come home. She could concede one thing. Nash was right about her doing too much for Gabe. He’d never make it to a man if she continued to treat him as a boy.

  “It’ll be good for him.”

  Nash sank his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and breathed for long moments. Charlotte wished, just once, he would get crazy mad and spout out his first thoughts, no matter how toxic, so that she wouldn’t have to wrestle with the space of always wondering. But when his voice came, it was infuriatingly calm.

  “That what you’re telling yourself? That missing someone is good? Because from where I’m standing, nothing good has come out of you leaving. We’re still fighting, I’m drowning in chores that were never meant for one person, and you pissed away a sizeable chunk of cash on that damned shop that we needed to pay the vet bill down so that you could…” He took a few steps, rearranged his damp hair, wrangled his hands back into his pockets, controlled, dormant. “…Jesus, I don’t even know what this is. A midlife crisis? Some weird stage of grief? A mental break? What, Charlotte? Tell me how to fix this so we can go back to the way things were.”

  “Before Mama died? Before the bridal shop took up all my time? Before Freesia and Daddy’s secret life, and an older sister, who has somehow become the needy baby sister that drains everyone’s emotional energy?”

  Nash shrugged, his shoulders wide and soaked and powerful in the moonlight. “Well…yeah.”

  Charlotte wanted to … Lord, she wanted to pull away, sprint the fence line and holler until she purged out every cell in her body that had betrayed her, that had turned Nash into the enemy here, that had left her wanting more when all she ever wanted was others to need her. She wanted to pound his chest until she collapsed into his arms and he carried her all the way into the house and made love to her until he could see right up inside her to what had her so mixed up. But none of that was to be, so she tried to put it to words, the best way she knew how.

  “That’s just it. The problem is with the way things were. I came through all of that and you’re still miles behind.” The ache behind her navel dislodged and scaled up to chip away at her voice. Nash flooded on hot, unshed tears. “When did you let go of my hand?”

  She wasn’t sure he knew what she meant, that he had been her lifeline coming home all those uncomfortable Sundays. His macro-pauses in conversations that left room for thinking also left cavernous spaces of doubt that he knew her at all.

  “Take a look around you, Char. This is what we always talked about, you and me. We made it happen. Us. Our dream.”

  “This was your dream. I just went along with it because I had yet to make my own.”

  She knew the exact moment her words penetrated. Nash leaned forward, hands at his knees, as if the wind had been knocked from him or he’d taken the back hoof of a thousand-pound animal to the nuts. “Jesus, Char. What the fuck? Think you could have said something before we were swimming in debt to keep this place afloat?”

  Charlotte’s cheeks felt like a catchall trap to a rain barrel—tears, sweat from a coat that suddenly felt too heavy, an existence too out of control, and a winter deluge that showed no sign of letting up. “This place is you. It makes you happy. That was all I needed at eighteen when we started out.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I have to find the place that’s me. I want that to be beside you, I do.”

  Nash straightened and scrubbed a hand across his tired eyes, the day’s growth along his jaw. “I don’t understand you. Any of this.”

  That made two of them.

  Charlotte glanced at Tibbs. Despite hating the rain, despite lacking oils in his glands that most birds had to make them waterproof, despite the shelter at the far end they had built to protect him from the elements, he stood beside her at the fence. Her throat closed. For long moments, she couldn’t push words past.

  “Remember when Mark died and you drove with your dad up to his cabin in Tennessee because you couldn’t breathe and had to get things right in your head? He said he found you in the middle of the lake, standing in a rowboat, cursing the full moon. Took three weeks for you to fall apart and put yourself back together.”

  Nash dug at the ground with the toe of his boot. He remembered.

  “This is my boat,
Nash. My lake.”

  He nodded and kept kicking at the thatch of wild grass. Never was one to show much emotion. If Nash didn’t trust himself to speak, he wouldn’t.

  “I have to go.” Out of the rain. Home. To find a place where things felt right again and she didn’t feel like she was screaming into a pasture with no one to hear her but a lovesick bird.

  “I’ll be here.” His words didn’t come out quite right the first time, so he repeated himself with more force. “Ain’t going nowhere.”

  “I love you, Nash Strickland.” Charlotte walked backward to where she’d parked. Tibbs followed along the fence line, dropped once, and gave her a last, desperate shimmy. She might have cleared a laugh had the whole darned moment not had the bleak, surreal sense of goodbye. “Don’t you for one second doubt it.”

  Charlotte hustled back inside her van. She thought to take a left at the far corner of the fence, pull into the drive, go inside and start dinner the way she always did. But something inside stopped her; something indefinable and infinitely lonely. She mashed the accelerator and headed right.

  Nash and Tibbs stood in the rain until she’d pulled off the gravel road that led to their patch of long-ago dreams and onto the highway.

  4

  Alex

  Alex wasn’t herself. Assuming she knew who that was anymore. So much in her life had changed with the onset of motherhood. But finding herself the soberest person at an impromptu gathering definitely fell into the otherworldly category. The idea had been Charlotte’s: wine and pedicures, as if the three March sisters had commonalities that stretched beyond DNA, as if they hadn’t just traveled emotional light years only to discover there was no magic elixir of closeness past mere tolerance.

  Freesia hadn’t wanted the forced proximity either. Alex saw it in the way she tumbled sips of a bold Petit Sirah around her tongue before swallowing, the way she glanced toward the sewing room that had once been Stella Irene’s space, like she would rather be stitched inside there, the way her eyes tightened each time the conversation turned to unsafe topics—the shop as it related to inheritance, their shared father, lies Charlotte told about why she had moved back into the childhood home. Freesia and Alex made an attempt because Charlotte navigated the middle ground and that landscape was a parched, hellish place for any one person to bear the burden alone.

  So, they settled in the living room, the thick pile of beige carpet at their bare toes, Mama’s God-awful lamps with eagle bases as sentinels to the custard light, and sampled conversations that went nowhere, punctuated by awkward lulls and acetate fumes from bottles of nail polish with names like Dear Mr. Hottie and Silicone Dreams. When the third false start at acting as friends failed, Charlotte said, “Well, this party needs a good old injection of something real,” and pulled an envelope from her robe pocket.

  Not just any envelope. Charlotte’s envelope from Mama. The same one Clement Grant, esquire handed her on F-day—the January day so called by Alex for the obvious, the day Freesia upended their lives, but also for the varied and colorful verbal meltdowns Alex had on behalf of the revelation since.

  “It’s about time I share this. Nash has heard it so much he could probably quote from it in his sleep.”

  That Nash knew something about Alex’s mother she didn’t know shifted her apart from herself until she remembered the truth of the past: her mother, Stella Irene, in the trailer at the far end of the property, fucking other men, the reason why Daddy had left and Camille Day had found him in a bad way, Alex moving as far from Devon as she could go, all the way to Boston.

  “Charlotte, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to listen,” said Freesia. “I’ll leave you two.”

  Freesia made to rise, her grand escape from the vacuous torture not so grand when Charlotte reached for her wrist.

  “You’re our sister. You should hear this, too.”

  To Alex, she was simply Freesia. But Charlotte called her sister. Some days, when young men promised to other women came into the bridal store and stared covertly at her bare cocoa butter shoulders and the lines of her that were lithe and perfect and untouched by pregnancy, Alex thought even less of her. And herself.

  Freesia resettled. Alex wished for the same, reconsidered the wine.

  “Why now?” said Alex.

  “Why ever not?”

  “You always carry it in your robe or did you plan this?” Alex’s pulse lumbered in her chest.

  Charlotte blinked back, her face ashen in the poor lighting. “Why are you so upset?”

  “It’s an emotional ambush. I never did that with Daddy’s letter.”

  “You never offered to share it.” Charlotte’s voice hinted at waterworks, ever the Evangeline in the March story. She fanned her gloppy toenails with the envelope as if drying the paint took greater precedence than an unplanned breakdown in an otherwise orchestrated night.

  Both of them stared at Alex, waiting for an explanation. Maybe waiting for her to go because she so often felt like the outsider that Freesia should have been. Daddy’s letter was private and had nothing to do with Charlotte or a drive to the ocean to bed a lonely woman or any topic up for mass consumption.

  Charlotte soldiered on, Alex’s protests a side note to her sister’s desire for truth and harmony.

  “Dear Charlotte,” she read.

  It’s a strange thing, near the end, knowing those left behind will come to know you in a way they didn’t in life. No doubt, you’ll find the number of cigarette cases stashed in a box under the bed puzzling, since I never once lit a cigarette. At least that’s what your Daddy thought. When things became too hard or the loneliness too quiet, I sat in back of the house and looked out over our acreage and fancied myself a Southern Holly Golightly of sorts, someone who always put on a smile to distract myself from how ordinary I was. Of course, I didn’t have Audrey Hepburn’s long, black cigarette holder. That would have been taking it too far, something your father always accused me of. But the nights I exchanged lights with the fireflies I came close to me. Closer than I was at just about any other time.

  I see me in you, sweet Charlotte, always playing a part, never sure of the role you were meant to play. You bring so much happiness. Fight for that, for yourself. About few things in life I can tell you with certainty, but I aim to here. I have made more mistakes than one woman should be allowed, but I always searched for a way to make up for my misgivings.

  Alex remembered Stella Irene’s night roaming, the high grasses at Alex’s knees as she followed her mother, her white dress against the trailer’s dirty white panels before the sky opened with rain. And the taillights of her daddy’s car as he left because Alex couldn’t leave well enough alone. A bubble of something dark filled her awareness. She wanted to scream at Charlotte to stop, to keep the letter private the way she had kept Daddy’s, but there was so much distance already and Charlotte’s voice was so very reverent because she did not know the things Mama had done.

  Never be afraid to fall apart. It is in the rebuilding that you become who you were meant to be all along.

  Loneliness is not an affliction, it is a necessary stillness. One that forces you to befriend yourself. And that is far greater than the friendship of others.

  Keep people in your life who inspire you to become more Charlotte, not less.

  Speak up, speak out, forgive, and know that you and Alex and the sister to come were the very best things I did.

  Alex willed Maddie to awaken and cry, to extract her from sentences where words like best and sister to come existed in the same breath.

  You may not understand it now, or ever, but it all worked out as it was meant to. Love, eternally, Mama.

  The curdled light blurred Alex’s vision, gave the room a surreal cast, caught somewhere between words written in the past, and freshly heard now. She stared at the carpet fibers sprouting between her toes—at nothing at all.

  “Mama always said I was so much like her,” said Charlotte. “But in all those daydreams where I could be
her, roaming the house at all hours or sitting on the deck staring out at the fields, waiting, or I could be Daddy behind the steering wheel, driving away…”

  “Don’t say it…” Alex warned.

  Charlotte’s spine straightened. This time, her words came out with more bite. “I was always inside that Ford.”

  Alex picked up a nearby bottle of burgundy polish, aptly named Salty and Done. She whacked it against her palm to shake it, to give the tension building in her fists, her neck, a place to escape. “No. No, you can’t. You’re Mama.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we can’t both be someone who leaves. If we fall apart, they’ll be no one left to make it right.”

  Alex hadn’t meant to growl out her thoughts. Couldn’t believe she’d said it aloud. Whiskey would have taken the edge off things best left in the past, but Maddie had made her a better person. Alex could do better now than blurred nights on a balcony overlooking Boston, better than Daddy sitting behind the newspaper at the kitchen table, clinking ice against a bar glass and asking Alex to work through problems, all while pretending his problems didn’t have the capacity to obliterate his family. She opened the polish and slathered a thick layer on her thumbnail. So far past salty, Alex was done.

  Freesia was first to speak. “The time she visited me, I was struck by her courage. I’m not sure I could have done the same.”

  “Driven away the man you loved?”

  “Alex!”

  Charlotte tossed the letter, aimed at Alex, but the worn, flower-printed missive fluttered to the carpet like shed skin.

  “You think Mama’s mistakes amounted to nothing more than a burned pie in the oven or a few cross words aimed at her children? Think bigger, Charlotte. You think Daddy up and left because she was sad? Wake up.” Alex capped the bottle and stood, rather awkwardly. She didn’t know why she should give a shit if her nail polish smeared, but there it was—she gave a shit. “Mama did the same thing to Daddy that you’re doing to Nash. Only difference is, you still have time to fix it.”