“Mabs is a flake,” said Alex.
Charlotte fanned her eye makeup dry. “A flake’s money spends the same as all the rest.”
“Why, Charlotte,” said Alex in her best Scarlett O’Hara voice. “How very business-minded of you.”
They exited the office to find Jonah holding Maddie, lips pressed to her forehead in a kiss, whispering something she wouldn’t remember beyond the warmth and security of the moment.
Alex gathered her heart in her throat.
“If my ovaries weren’t so tired, they’d be sighing and singing Hallelujah at that sight,” said Charlotte.
Typical of her sister. Charlotte had a way of wrapping crazy emotional movements up in transparent paper and tying them with a bow of humor. She might as well have said “Alex, you’re an idiot for not taking this chance.” Maddie was not Jonah’s child, yet he loved her like she was his own flesh and blood. That should be the way of it, always. Love for the sake of love. Love by choice, the very best variety. But the very nature of choice made it vulnerable to change. Time saw to that. Change had happened with her ex-husband, Michael, and again when Alex had decided that Devon was her home. Maddie had saved Alex, and the baby deserved better than the fragility of choice.
“Where did the customer go?” asked Alex.
“The one that looked like a Stepford Wife? Said to tell you thank you, that she was going to see Diane, and that if she found something, she’d give Charlotte a free push out at three thousand feet, whatever that meant.”
“It won’t help to make the rent payment,” said Alex, “but I’d take a hit in profits to see that.”
Charlotte took Maddie from Jonah’s arms and cooed, “That’ll happen on the twelfth of never.”
12
Charlotte
Nash was never one to run late, until Charlotte wasn’t around to make sure he was on time. She stood out in front of the two-show theater for a good ten minutes before he rolled up, apologetic and smelling like a just-showered dream. Taffy had Richard Gere; Charlotte had the flowy-haired Aquaman on a Harley.
Turned out, the starting time to her chosen show had passed. Her pick was an action adventure, miles away from a sleepy Mississippi town. Instead, they watched the family drama set on a horse ranch in the middle of nowhere with a dying matriarch, sisters who had become estranged, and enough sad songs to make a coonhound reach for a tissue box. Normally, Delta Burke was her spirit animal, but it was all too close to home. By the time she and Nash settled onto the tailgate of his truck with an ice cream cone from the fancy place in Marthasville, her night felt like jumbled cupcakes all over again.
“Cold?” His baritone voice rumbled through her chest.
Charlotte’s teeth chattered a bit. She shook her head.
Her reflex. Someone else, usually one of the kids, was always dressed lighter, was more susceptible to getting sick, complained louder, so she’d give up her jacket, face the wind, endure discomfort so others didn’t have to. She had to stop doing that. Last she checked, no one gave out prizes to common martyrs.
“I knew you’d like that movie.” Nash licked around the cone seam of his mint chocolate chip scoop to keep it contained, less messy. His bottle-slashed lip was halfway to healed. Made him look at bit more like a pouty model with pillowed lips.
Charlotte watched an orange droplet of her sherbet plunge past the cone’s edge and drift down to her hand, closer, closer. Her hips had selected the rainbow sherbet. The rest of Charlotte wanted pralines and cream.
“That checker at the grocery store with the white lips that you’re always talking to? She told me it’d be perfect.”
Charlotte conjured up a vision of Faye Wheeler, forgetting to sack and give proper change like she did when she got to talking and Nash offering too much information like he did when he got around to rubbing more than two sentences together. Likely, it was all over town by now that Nash was in the doghouse about something.
“Perfect for what? Stress eating?” A little like now. She had zero appetite. Maybe it was the cold.
Nash frowned. “For someone who likes to cry.”
“I don’t like to cry. It just happens.”
The defensiveness of her voice surprised her. She had wanted this, more than anything. The moment she knew Nash had sent the message, she’d counted the minutes until she saw him. But the reality of being with him no longer measured up.
Nash lowered his cone to his lap. “Have I done something? Again?”
He was all defeat—crushed voice, sagging jacket front, staring out into the darkness. Charlotte hated herself for bringing that out in him. It was like someone had wrung her inside out and she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t get back to rights. Lying beneath the tires so he could reverse over her seemed more fitting than finishing her tasteless sherbet and pretending.
“No.”
“I can’t say or do the right thing with you anymore. I’m trying here, Char. I really am. But you have to be honest with me.”
“I know.” Her chest felt tight, like she’d swallowed her opinions right along with a slip of lime.
They made progress on their cones in silence.
“Remember the game they played in the movie?” Nash said.
Charlotte thought back to the game the grandmother always played with her granddaughter, the one that had her confessing mistakes at the end and had left Charlotte a crying puddle. “The honesty game?”
“We could give it a try.” Nash crunched his first bite of waffle cone.
“All right.”
“You start.”
Charlotte started small. No sense jumping straight into the deep end. “Honesty game: Faye, the woman at the store with the white lipstick? She’s on her fourth husband, and if you’re getting romance advice from her, you might as well look up those ex-cons Daddy visited and ask them for career advice.”
Nash’s lips tweaked to a half-smile, an expression that, when captured underneath a dirty old ballcap, never failed to devastate. She lived inside the moment, the realization that she brought that out in him too—joy—and she found she could draw a breath around the vice in her chest.
“Honesty game: I thought you’d come home in a day, two days, tops. I didn’t realize how serious you were. Always making jokes about everything.”
His gaze grew sheepish. Like the time he’d tried on those flashy alligator boots and thought the whole boot store in Jackson was looking at him, thinking they weren’t right, judging. Game rules dictated no response, except if it was phrased in a question. Somehow, she felt safe to keep going.
“Honesty game: I hated that movie. Maybe on a different night or in a different life, but it was like ugly crying over the Titanic movie and reliving Mama’s death all over again.”
Nash tipped his cone toward her and her heart rolled over. It was a dance they’d perfected for years—absently sharing, sampling, what the other had. The gesture slipped them back into a rhythm they’d lost, if only for a moment. She took a lick off the top, then coveted the rest.
“Honesty game,” said Nash. “I hate chocolate.”
“But you always get chocolate…”
His brows popped up, giving her the space to adhere to the game rules.
“Honesty game: why do you always get chocolate?”
“Because I know you’ll want some.” He nudged what remained of his cone in her direction.
This time, Charlotte’s heart flopped over on its back and wiggled for a belly rub. She traded and sank her teeth into the blissful mint chocolate creaminess. Less than thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but his admission was all warmth going down.
He chuckled and finished off her sherbet. She did the same to his mint.
Charlotte realized then that she viewed Nash like an old pillowcase, worn to near transparency, frayed about the edges, not one inch untouched after all these years, the pattern all but invisible in its familiarity. But this revelation, as small as it was, a mere stitch of something new she had not known a
bout him, made her want to unravel her husband more to see what else she had missed about him.
“Remember the day you came home from your uncle’s and he’d decided to move away? Told you if you’d make half-payments and put the land back to work, you could keep the house and the profits until it was paid off?”
“Twenty-five years to the day. Best deal I ever made.”
“You were so excited you drove over and did dirt field burnouts on his unused acreage and had the biggest impromptu bonfire this town had ever seen.”
Nash shook his head, his grin wide at the memory. “Gave it fine soil for the next growing season.”
Charlotte closed her eyes, fought off the knot of what she wanted to say. “Honesty game: I went home that night and cried.”
“What? Why? You were there, celebrating beside me.”
“I was happy for you. It was everything you wanted. But I saw the next forty years of my life laid out for me, none of them like the stories I loved so much. And I had to decide if I wanted you more than I wanted to figure out who I was and what I wanted.”
“And now you’re regretting your choice,” he said, trying not to sound broken.
Charlotte hopped off the tailgate and took his face in her hands. His cheeks were cold. He had no choice but to look at her when she spoke. Not the family exiting their truck and trickling inside for ice cream. Not the darkness beyond. Nowhere but her.
“No. No, don’t ever think that, Nash. I’d go back and do every minute all over again. Our beautiful kids. The land and the home we built. I didn’t even think about the stories I never lived. It was all perfect until…”
He took her hands from his cheeks and placed them between his to warm them. Old habits.
“Until you found out your parents’ marriage wasn’t perfect?”
Charlotte nodded. “If they could go so wrong, what hope did we have?”
Nash tugged her toward the passenger side and propped open the door. He took off his coat and put it around her. A heat island. He always had been.
“We’re not them, Char. I will never leave you, leave this land.”
She knew that to be true. She also knew that suppressing truths gave them more power. “Honesty game: I’m scared I have my Daddy’s leaving in me.”
Nash turned, leaned his back against the truck cab. Something beyond, in the darkness, grabbed and held his attention. Beneath his flannel shirt, his chest rose and fell in an uneven cadence. Game rules dictated he didn’t have to speak, but he did, hoarse, gruff, as gravelly as the ground beneath their soles.
“Then I’ll just have to be here when you get back.”
Charlotte’s knees trembled and her heart slowed to a crawl. She lost her ability to stand, in this spot, in this separation. The love, the freedom inherent in his words, had the capacity to shatter her resolve.
“Honesty game?” But she already knew. This was Nash, after all. Never met a decision he didn’t back with his hands and his life.
His Adam’s apple lurched on a hard swallow before he spoke to his boots. “Yeah.”
She wanted to kiss his cheek, the way she had a thousand mornings, a thousand goodbyes, but she couldn’t remember the last time they had ended in that way. When did they stop contact at goodbye? It had been so long now, she couldn’t say. Had that been the beginning of seeing an end? It seemed off now, something that others did, so she crawled up into the passenger seat and stared straight ahead.
The family that had rushed inside the shop only moments earlier now emptied from it on commotion, all slurping cones and laughter, the father reminding them of bedtime, the mother reminding them not to drip on the truck’s seats. Three children. The family was them, years earlier. Someday, the couple who made eye contact over the truck would find themselves where Charlotte and Nash were, where Alex and Michael lost it all, where Mama and Daddy found it again.
Nash crawled behind the wheel and drove the distance to Devon, a few miles by dirt bike, slightly longer by road, a cross-country trek when he surrendered all his words again. She propped her elbow against the window, fist hiding her face. Crops once lit by headlamps blurred into darkness. Only then did the hive of tears gather behind her face.
Somehow, she had talked herself into leaving.
13
Alex
The pull of motherhood was an odd thing. It gave Alex time to reflect on her relationship with her own mother, strained as it was before her passing. Alex remembered nights watching the carbon filter burn orange on the deck, Stella Irene puffing away at her cigarette, looking off at the abandoned trailer as if she expected it, too, would light up and beckon her back. In an odd sort of way, the divisive image Alex carried with her into her journey with Maddie made her feel closer to her mother. The way she probably bet with the devil, promised that tomorrow would be different, that she’d do better, make better choices so the ripples wouldn’t threaten years from now.
Perfection was an elusive bastard.
Alex glanced down at her breast. Maddie had nodded off, not long ago, based on the churning motion of her miniature lips. Alex hadn’t noticed. That part of her had already grown accustomed to numbness. She worried after the rest of her. The prospect of a life with Jonah and Ibby and Maddie beginning with the same intent, the same caliber of worth, she had inside her to give as she once had with Michael, then slipping into imperfection paralyzed her. Michael had been a narcissist, never one to let a failed marriage bruise him, but Jonah? Alex would rather turn monastic than to ever hurt Jonah.
The gathering, hollow sound of a diesel engine strengthened. Alex listened for spaces inside the noise, indications all was progressing back to the way Charlotte’s life should have stayed: the delay of a truck door opening or closing on a kiss; the turning off of the idling engine as the kiss opened up; voices at the door, hesitant to end the night; excited footfalls on the steps, maybe two pairs.
Charlotte surprised her at the nursery door.
“Do you need anything, Pajama-ma?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Charlotte had settled on the nickname after Alex had thrown serious protest for drama-ma. On the first, second, and tenth washday after Maddie made her appearance, Charlotte had to bribe Alex out of her second-skin flowy cotton breeches with the baby rabbit-carrot pattern, riddled with the stains of new motherhood.
Despite the room’s dim light and shadows creeping in from the hallway, Alex could see she’d been crying.
Alex pulled the blanket higher to cover herself and settled her head back against the rocker’s cushion, drifting, drifting, drifting.
“I need you to come tell me what’s wrong.”
Charlotte’s gaze crumbled. “We shouldn’t wake…”
“She’s out,” said Alex. “Sit.”
What the nursery lacked in adult seating, it more than made up for in the white downy luxury that was the area rug. Hand-cut European shag met cumulonimbus clouds. Therapy for tired feet, cranky moods, nearly everything that ailed. Alex thought her sister might settle with her shoulders against the crib, legs stretched out. Instead, Charlotte kicked off her shoes and laid on her back, meditation pose or chalk outline, Alex couldn’t say.
“What’s it like to have an affair?”
Alex stopped rocking. “Jesus, Charlotte.”
“I mean, I have no one else to ask. You’re kind of an expert.”
“Thanks.” Cloudy rug or no cloudy rug, they had just fallen into a pit of something. Alex was almost afraid to ask the next question. “Did you have someone in mind?”
A good five seconds of pause was all the answer Alex needed.
“The truth, Alex. Not what you want me to hear.”
Alex pressed her heels against the floor as her nerves spidered around her memories, often jumbled: against steel railings on public transportation, darkened entryways where touch came on like a fire drill, mesmerizing forests of chest hair where Michael had none, the stench of what they’d created together like the first few moments
breathing air in a foreign land. She glanced at Maddie’s face, the soft bubbly sound of her sucking reflex an orchestral movement to Alex’s past dysfunction, and she nearly wept from the salvation Michael had finally given her.
Charlotte couldn’t take the details of those encounters any more than Alex wanted to offer them. The woman watched Magic Mike through her splayed fingers and thought a Tickler was the French version of the Hamburgler.
“Remember that ride—the Sea King—that you begged me to take you on at the carnival every year, all glossy turquoise with glitter rainbow letters and mermaid fins painted on the side? The minute the gates opened, we’d wait in the line that wrapped behind the trees until the sun set. By the time we got up to the front and all the bulbs were blinking on and off, every shade of blue imaginable, I thought you’d jump right out of your skin.”
Charlotte slow-blinked, her gaze on the ceiling, on their shared place, decades earlier.
“The best part of an affair is waiting in that line—thinking about the ride, the gripping of the bars, so new in your hand, the lights from a world so different than yours, the gravity against your stomach when it happens, the falling. And when you’re in the seat, you can hardly believe you’re there, doing things you never imagined you’d do. You barely recognize yourself, your bravery and courage, like a parallel world where everything is sharper and clearer and more intense. But then the ride ends. Always, it ends. Every so often, the adrenaline is liberating, but mostly, the spins leave you nauseous.”
Charlotte blew out a breath. “I might need Mama’s cigarette box.”
“The guilt after?” said Alex. “That’s the real ride. It comes in waves, like grief, but the pain is so far inside, you’re convinced it won’t ever surface. It festers until it turns to shame and eats away things that had nothing to do with the ride—friendships, dreams. Family.”
The word—family—circled the air like Maddie’s mobile, meant as a stimulant, more for Alex’s benefit in the end.
“Who is he?”
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 9
