Charlotte’s stare crumbled low, the same pout-out, injured look she had when she got to the part of Longfellow’s poem when the Angel of Death came for Evangeline’s Gabriel.
“That’s enough. I think we’re done here.” Freesia held the letter like it was the lone copy of the Declaration of Independence and reached for Charlotte’s hand.
And just like that, the tide of truth washed Alex further out, isolated.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Alex said. “To be done with talking about mistakes so we can all go on pretending.”
Freesia squeezed then let loose of Charlotte’s hand. Her mouth drawn into a hard line, until she drifted close enough to Alex that there was no mistaking where her words meant to land. Even syllables marked a control she had always possessed, that Alex longed to possess.
“Pretending is your area of expertise, sister.”
Freesia left then, folding herself into the pleat of her sanctuary room.
Alex looked at Charlotte who wrapped her robe tighter around her like a layer of armor in soft waffle-print.
“If she leaves Devon, if she leaves because of you…”
For a time, she seemed unable to finish. Once Mama’s letter was safely tucked inside her robe pocket, right about the time a storm in the form of a diesel engine rumbled up and parked at their little strip of land, her voice broke.
“…we’re done.”
5
Charlotte
Nash laid on the horn like Milkshake had gone into labor and Charlotte was the only human-midwife for a hundred miles who could save mama and calf. By the time Charlotte flew out the door and ran up on him clamoring down from his truck, she had a handful of possible scenarios playing out in her brain: Natalie had disclosed something on social media that had made her a momentary pariah; Allison had fled from her biology dissection and declared that she’d rather be a pole dancer than a large-animal vet; Gabe had his nose in a book and had walked straight into Derek McGill, Devon’s schoolyard terrorist. Heck, even Taffy ran through her mind—grill fires and health inspectors and the off chance that a white-haired Richard Gere had rolled into town, sampled her lemon pancakes, and whisked her to Tahiti for a romantic interlude.
Definitely horn-worthy.
She hadn’t seen Nash for a week and he looked a fright: a tangle of shrubbery where his strong chin once was; shorts and knee-high socks in the cold because, well, laundry; Atlanta Braves cap that looked like it had been dipped in tractor grease, twisted atop his head, more backward than forward. He left the truck idling as if he meant to sweep her up, whisk her off somewhere, but when she rounded the front bumper, the man had nothing to say. Not one word.
“Nash…”
Now her husband wasn’t one for grand gestures of any kind. The most he ever stepped out of his comfort zone to show emotion was when the feed store started stocking his favorite jerky near the checkout and he gave the next patron in line a hearty clap on the back over their shared love of venison. But darned if he didn’t sit his saggy britches down atop his chrome bumper and make a wrinkled ball of his hat. As much an outward display of emotion as Nash could muster.
From the second-floor window, Maddie launched from her evening snooze. A niggle of annoyance tickled up Charlotte’s spine, but most days Nash clipped down the road like a sloth in a wedding march. Something was wrong.
“What is it, Nash?”
“You need to come home.”
Charlotte waited for more; faulty field sprinklers flooding the property road, his dad with another mild stroke, Natalie running off to the ruins with the sleeve-tattoo guy from the auto parts store. Events that proved more than one adult could handle. Something to justify Nash churning up grass on the front lawn with his monster truck rally maneuver. The longer he sat there, close-lipped, the more that niggle against every one of her vertebrae turned into an all-out assault on her central nervous system. She would have settled for a declaration about the desperate state of affairs at Casa Strickland, maybe a rambling narrative about how much he needed her because his white jockeys had been washed with Gabe’s red Shakespeare Festival shirt, but she supposed that was the way of it. Settling.
“That’s it?” said Charlotte. “You drive over here like you got a rocket booster for a tailpipe and all you have is ‘you need to come home’?”
“Gabe’s forgotten his lunch three days straight, the girls are glued to their phones, and last night I set the smoke alarms off burning a frozen pizza.”
“They need to help out more. I’ll talk to them. Spring Break is next week and Gabe’ll be off camping with your dad. And the fair’ll be here. You could tie fair privileges to the girls getting chores done.”
“Come home. We’ve done your little experiment. Everyone in town either thinks Alex is the worst mama in the world ’cause she ain’t caught on to motherhood yet or you’re just the biggest sucker for letting her take advantage of you. Neither looks good.”
Charlotte chose to ignore the patronizing word, little. “Since when do you care what the gossipers think?”
“Since people started asking if we were okay.” He fiddled with his hat like he meant to put it back on his head then thought better of it.
“Who’s asking?”
“Jonah, for one.”
“He’s practically family. Him asking doesn’t count as gossip.”
“I don’t know what to tell him.” Nash crushed the brim to an exaggerated curve then whacked the flappy part against his thigh a few times, as if the expert level of mud was nothing but dust bunnies. “I don’t even know, myself.”
“Don’t you want me to be happy?”
Inside, Maddie quieted her cries. Charlotte? Well, she was just getting started.
“That mean you’re not happy with me?” Nash sniffed, brushed an absent finger at the base of his nose to scratch an itch and set the hat to rights, the brim pulled low, impossibly low, covertly low.
A good thing. Charlotte didn’t know if she could look him in the eye to answer. She remembered Freesia’s words. Don’t ever be afraid to say what you think. But doing so was so much harder when it came down to it.
“No. Not for a while.” It was the first time she had been honest with him, with herself, and spoke it aloud. And the truth felt like a runaway bride, all adrenaline and wrong.
“How long?”
Charlotte shrugged, but she knew. July 4th, several years back. The same town celebration they attended every year. The day had been long and hot. Natalie and Allison and Gabe had been off in a field with sparklers; she and Nash were on a blanket in the same truck bed. She confessed that she thought she might be pregnant again, was almost in tears because it was all so much, so unwanted with three mouths to feed already, with Gabe already so old. She reached for Nash’s hand.
He didn’t reach back.
Instead, he hopped off the tailgate and disappeared into the dark. First time in her life she’d watched the fireworks alone. First time she’d noticed the disconnect between the light and sound vibration in her chest, the disconnect between what everyone else saw and what she felt. She hadn’t been pregnant, but it had been the inception of thoughts beyond Nash. Those dangerous what-ifs that crawled up inside the mundane: buttering his toast before dawn, trimming the hair at his neckline between barber visits, laughing when he took a swipe at good humor.
“Summer before last,” Charlotte said. “So you can’t blame Alex. Or Freesia.”
His go-to of late.
“You got all these ideas inside your head about the way things are supposed to be,” said Nash. “That other married folks are having more sex and drawing baths with rose petals and shit. That other husbands talk about their feelings and bring their wives coffee in bed every morning. Some days, it’s all I can do to roll out of bed and pull on my boots to start the day because my damned back hurts so much.”
At twenty, two years after they were married, Nash’s cousin had wrapped the pickup they were driving around a tall oak at t
he edge of town. Coupled with three years as a varsity defensive lineman, Nash’s recovery required enough metal pins to qualify as a voodoo doll on Bourbon Street. His mental recovery from losing his cousin wasn’t so fortunate. Didn’t really surface until Mark and the helicopter. Nash’s strategy in life—ingest it all. And if there’s more, inject it under the skin or shove it up as a suppository. Anything but give the unfortunates in life a voice, legs, power.
Mention of his back always made Charlotte’s pity surface, made her back down, but she had pain, too. Namely, the one that had taken up residence behind her breastbone when she thought about enduring decades more of the nothingness that had settled between them. If she caved now, they’d spend the rest of their lives settling for anything just to say they had something.
“I’ll come home on one condition.”
Nash’s expression sprang up like she’d released a bungee cord tethering him to the bed he’d made. “Yeah?”
Charlotte slid her wedding band free, handed it to him, and said, “Date me.”
He held the ring in his hand like she’d just given him a menstruation cup and told him his assignment was to puzzle out its use. “What?”
“I may have a drawl that’d put moonshiners to shame, but I don’t stutter.” The more the idea settled in the night air and wrapped around her muscles, tired from carrying the lion’s share of the marriage load, the more inspired the challenge became in her mind. “Date me.”
“How can I date you if we’re already married?”
“Nash Strickland, you are a genius at coming up with practical solutions to things that need fixing. And we need fixing. Get me to marry you all over again, and we’ll be back to touching toes in no time.” Charlotte and Nash’s contribution to Match Made in Devon’s second-floor secrets: Always touch toes at night. Even if you go to bed spittin’ mad, it’s a reminder that you’re there, that you love each other, no matter what.
His mouth was slack enough to catch a family of flies. Even bewildered, he was the handsomest man she’d ever met. At sixteen, handsome had been nearly everything. At thirty-four, handsome was no longer enough to hitch her trailer. Nash tried several times to produce speech. In the end, he paced, which seemed to summon words from somewhere.
“This ain’t all me. There’s two in a relationship here.”
“You’re right. And I aim to do plenty of thinking about who I am and what I want and how I can fix my part in all this. But if you drove that truck there off into a ditch, you’d never wait for someone else to come along and get you out. The Nash I know is a determined, capable… and loving man.”
“Date you?” he echoed, to confirm, to distill it down to the absurd, to plant, sow and harvest the concept to its most basic terms. “And you’ll stop all this nonsense?”
Charlotte flinched. She’d have to teach him the diminishing power of words. For now, she didn’t want to muddy their step forward. She nodded.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“I’m busy.” Disinfecting the refrigerator meat drawer.
“Next night?”
“Busy then, too.” Netflix marathon, romance movies.
“Friday?”
“I’ll check my calendar.”
Nash tossed his hands up in the air like he was already calling mercy.
“You’ve shown more persistence getting boll weevils out of your cotton rows,” said Charlotte. “Go home and ask me proper. Tossing every day up against the wall and hoping something sticks isn’t the path to a woman’s heart.”
He stomped over to his driver’s side door, opened it with more force than necessary. “Path is mighty damned thorny if you ask me.”
Somewhere inside, at the bottom of her emotional well, a lightness, a warmth, something close to a laugh, surfaced. Charlotte pressed her lips together to keep the droplet of amusement inside, maybe bring it up later to drink a cupful along with memories of how he’d once tickled her funny bone like no other.
It’s the wine talking, Charlotte. Make him earn you back.
“And slow down.” Like a sloth in a wedding march. Her words came out like an admonishment, a nag. Not Charlotte’s intent. Nash may have found himself on the figuring end of a problem, but she still wanted him to come out of the battle intact. One life sacrificed at the base of a now-crooked oak out on the highway was one too many for a lifetime.
He sat in the truck cab, door closed, for some time. She couldn’t get over how his lips fell around that arresting dimple at his chin, how the shadows at his eyes outpaced advancing darkness at the horizon. It took every bit in her to stand her ground, newly-varnished toes buried in the gravel. How easy it would be to climb up beside him, stroke her thumb along the bruised skin beneath his eyes, listen to a familiar song on the way home, a path she could navigate blindfolded.
Much the way she had navigated the back half of her marriage.
The truck’s hungry tires devoured the gravel the way he had come. For most men, blowing off steam often came on manly, defiant endeavors—pounding longnecks, cursing someone’s ma, scratching balls, wielding tools. For Nash, he’d immerse himself in his flock—his children, his animals, to the detriment of his health. That she remembered the very best thing about him—his loyalty—sidled up alongside the possibility that he may not rise to her challenge. Loyalty was born of choice.
What if Nash chose a life without her?
6
Freesia
On the morning she dressed her fifth store window mannequin in a Freesia Day original gown, the crowd outside was bigger than ever. Despite the nip in the air, the usual suspects were there: the Silver Swarm with their hot to-go beverages, Elliot Davis to snap a photo for the Devon Daily, a handful of men who had wandered down from the barber shop to see what all the fuss was about, Charlotte’s twin girls and Jonah’s daughter, Isabel—because having a fashion designer in their midst was “the coolest thing to happen around here since that Goth magician broke down in town and made the mayor’s car disappear.” Someday, Freesia would ask for the whole story.
The crowd was appreciated. For Alex, the usual suspects amounted to a lot of traffic that didn’t impact the shop’s bottom line. For Freesia, the gathering made her feel like she was doing something of note. Art in a place that was otherwise lacking. Alex eventually conceded. Maybe her half sister’s soft spot came from mannequin one, dressed in Freesia’s first named creation: Alex.
Awash in warm floodlights, she waved and invited everyone in for the breakfast treats Taffy had sent over earlier. She gave her fifth interview to the newspaper. The interviews had evolved from her roots—minus the salacious details of how the three proprietors came to be sisters—through the stories of strong women Freesia had met on her travels with volunteer organizations in underserved places around the world. The fifth dress in the collection was a white silk off-the-shoulder with a jacketed bodice and a high-low silhouette. She named the style Iro, after the Portuguese woman who took her in for a night and was the quintessential mother Freesia had always wanted. Iro’s kitchen, a place of immense familial love, had the iconic Azulejo sapphire-and-white patterned tiled floor. The Iro gown had a visible underskirt in the same vein, every mirrored geometric shape hand-embroidered, that had amounted to four months of nightly work.
“What is your endgame here, Miss Day?” Elliot’s tone introduced a discordant, cynical angle to the conversation. He held his usual fountain pen recorder between them.
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“Let’s get real for a sec. You’re in a Godforsaken town where the closest thing to fashion is when the women at the discount store cover their bra straps and ass cheeks. Your shop’s online presence is in its infancy, at best, so the only real hope you have of recuperating the time and talent you put into this dress is to burn it and get the insurance money.”
She might have formulated a zippy response, but two things happened in close proximity. One, she became obsessed with the movement of his hair—o
r lack thereof. Not quite gravity-defying, not quite washed. Also, a bluish shade of glossy black that reminded her of a spider trapped in a flashlight beam. Two, Charlotte swooped in like a goose whose gosling had been cornered by a mangy dog.
“You’ll have to excuse Elliot. Fancies himself a homegrown Anderson Cooper, minus the lineage, the worldliness, or the sexy hair. Bless his heart, he’s just trying to make his daddy proud.”
Elliot flashed her an unamused smile and begged off.
“I do wish his daddy had hired someone better suited,” said Charlotte. “Lucifer comes to mind.”
“He isn’t wrong.” Freesia glanced at her Iro. It nearly stole her breath every time she laid eyes on it, even from the back, but in the small-town window, even with a layer of fresh paint and craftsman-quality crown moldings from last year’s renovation, the dress seemed a little like the Hope Diamond set against a plain button-down shirt with cowboy embroidery on it.
“Well, I can’t speak to your endgame, but I can speak for the present. You’re a gift to my girls and to all the other girls in this town who crave the kind of inspiration that doesn’t come atop a John Deere.” Charlotte nodded at Natalie and Allison, snapping photos of the gown on their phones and posting to the shop’s social media. “That was me sixteen years ago, before I believed I could run a business or survive on my own or be appreciated for something other than pretty hair and a smile. I used to walk in someplace and wonder if people liked me. Was I good enough? Smart enough? Polite enough? And then you came along with your dreams and your head held high, someone who knew herself enough to walk in someplace and wonder if you liked them. I want that for my girls, for all the women who walk past on the street and see that dress in the window, for all the brides that walk in that door. We all deserve more, and you are so much more.”
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 5
