He reached in his pocket and pulled out her Daddy’s old keychain. One well-loved engine key dangled from the ring.
“What’s this?”
“Been working on it for a while, just in case. Nights when I couldn’t sleep. Should run well now, keep you safe, get you where you want to go past that city limit sign. Memphis. Georgia. Wherever.”
“In case of what?”
“In case I held on too tight. This was it, Charlotte. My last effort. I don’t have anything else in me. I tried so hard to get my arms around you, around what was happening, but the harder I held on, the more you wiggled away. I won’t say I want you to go. You know that’d be a lie. But I can’t be the one who holds you back. Not anymore.”
She turned the key in her palm. He no longer waited for her to go; he pushed her away.
“Goodbye, Char.”
He crossed the sunlit field, unbuttoning his fancy shirt cuffs, the buttons that always choked him at the neck. He was a man tapped out of pressure, pain, patience. She couldn’t have stopped him if she tried. She didn’t. And she hated herself for it. Her heart and her head had swapped places somewhere over the terrain of their marriage. Mixed up and sideways was no way forward in love. Nash deserved better.
* * *
Mama always said the hardest steps in life were best fueled by good friends and a stout cup of coffee. This day, at Taffy’s Diner, an hour before Match Made in Devon opened for business, proved no exception.
Charlotte couldn’t say when she’d decided to leave town. In a way, Nash had made the decision for her, which put her right back to where she’d always been. But the inertia of her choices proved too strong to fight, and to everyone who witnessed Nash’s exit off the airfield, who knew they had fallen apart, it seemed an inevitability. Charlotte wasn’t convinced, but she had longed to take a drive, to see the city limit sign in her rearview mirror. Staying with Alex and Freesia had been an open window. Nash saying goodbye blew open a door. Charlotte had only to walk through.
Taffy loaded up a plate with her famous banana bread French toast sticks—Charlotte’s favorite—but she couldn’t muster one taste bud to flip the switch on her iron stomach. Tucked into the biggest round booth the diner had to offer, likely the same one her mother occupied before all her hardest steps in life, the emotional press of being surrounded by strong women buoyed her courage.
“I’ve heard the Outer Banks are nice this time of year,” said Frances.
Bernice picked up a napkin and wiped a smudge of maple syrup off her boob shelf that read: In my defense, I was left unsupervised. “Her first taste of freedom in sixteen years, Franny. I doubt she wants to watch sailboats and seagulls. Vegas. That’s the direction she should head.”
“Paris.” Hazel’s vote.
“You can’t drive to Paris,” Bernice chided.
“Leave the girl be,” said Taffy. “She’ll do just fine. Anyone who jumps out of a plane has enough inside to be all right anywhere.”
“Are the twins coming to see you off?” Alex asked.
Charlotte shook her head. “We had a talk last night. Mostly, I talked. No way for them to understand, but I couldn’t leave without an explanation, not the way Daddy did us. I promised Gabriel a post card every day, no matter where I was.”
Frances reached across the table and placed her hand over Charlotte’s. “They couldn’t have a finer support system here. You know we’ll take good care.”
Her words nearly collapsed Charlotte’s resolve. She shouldn’t need her friends to give good care. She should be the one to give good care.
“Fact is, they’ll probably get sick of us,” said Hazel.
Bernice shot Hazel a sarcastic grin. “One of us, at least.”
Hazel balled up a napkin and threw it at Bernice. The wad bounced right off the word defense. Bernice crumbled in on herself, giggling.
“I’m sure these sisters have some goodbying to do,” said Taffy. “Come on, ladies.”
The Silver Swarm moved like maiden bridesmaids at a bouquet toss, and when the dust cleared, the March sisters looked around the table at each other and laughed. Slivers of warmth collected along Charlotte’s spine. It was a moment Charlotte wished could go on indefinitely—this newfound comradery. They weren’t perfect, far from it, but each time one of them fell apart and the others were there to pick up pieces, they built again, stronger, closer to how they should have been all along.
On their way out the door, Taffy handed her a sack and brushed imaginary crumbs from her apron. “Banana bread, for the road. Tell someone where you are. Doesn’t have to be me.”
Charlotte thanked her and pulled her into an embrace.
“Be careful,” Taffy whispered, then hustled back inside and started wiping a counter that was already clean.
Charlotte frowned. Taffy had been her mama’s best friend. Had promised her she’d always watch over Alex and Charlotte.
At Daddy’s truck, Alex pulled a thick envelope from her bag and handed it to Charlotte.
“What’s this?” Charlotte asked.
“Last month’s profits. You’ll need something to live on. We each put in some extra, too, so you could come back by choice, not because you had no money left.”
“And the shop?” Mae’s words charged from Charlotte’s memory: Don’t ever stop doing what you do.
Alex glanced at Freesia. “Relying on each other won’t be the worst we’ve been through.”
A cautious smile played at Freesia’s lips.
Charlotte asked her, “Are you sure about New York?”
“I still have some time to decide,” said Freesia. “Besides, I haven’t bought into Jon Yu’s theory about wedding dresses being the antiquated trappings of love. He’s never set foot in Match Made in Devon. Nothing antiquated about the love in that place. You’re the biggest part of that, Charlotte. Go. Do you. Do Charlotte better than anyone.”
You spread love to women at the exact moment they’re giving love away to another. Fills a void.
The chill air made her cheeks feel feverish. She should go before she changed her mind. But conversation had always been Charlotte’s super power and her feet wouldn’t budge. Connection was a hard thing to suspend in favor of loneliness, the necessary stillness Mama wrote about. Befriending herself after all she was putting her family through wouldn’t be easy.
“Any advice from a world traveler?” Charlotte asked Freesia.
“Just that you already are a world traveler,” Freesia said. “A Buddhist nun in Tibet once said to me that all women are world travelers. We’re masters at traveling between identities. Every role takes us to a different world, even if we don’t change our surroundings. You’re a mother who always knows what’s best for her children. You’re a sister and a half sister, a daughter, a friend, a wife. I could go on. Bingo winner, sexy pool hustler, carnival performer, saver of animals, champion of slighted women, skydiver.”
“Don’t forget business woman,” added Alex.
Coming from Alex, businesswoman might have been the most supreme trip of all.
“You don’t need to travel to the Outer Banks or Vegas or Nepal to loosen the ties on who you are. New experiences, different corners, a shift in perspective—they’re all just as powerful.”
Charlotte hadn’t had many occasions to embrace Freesia—the three March sisters had such a slow crawl from awareness to their current state, tiptoeing around the whole friendship thing—but Freesia’s words inspired a good old-fashioned embrace. Charlotte breathed in Freesia’s orchid scent, absorbed her warmth, pressed her lips against the coarse texture of her hair, so unlike her own. She wanted Freesia to know how much she had enriched her life, how glad she was that all the heaviness had turned into lightness, how Freesia was the different world that Charlotte most wanted to revisit time and again, but Alex was there and still raw, not quite as far traveled down that road, so Charlotte merely smiled and squeezed her hand and searched her face for signs of Daddy to know she was on the right path.
She found it in the slight tip of her chin, the crook of her neck, as if to say you had it in you all along. Off with you now.
Charlotte turned to Alex. Her sister tamed a strand of her hair that floated on the breeze, slayed it behind her ear the way she had always done.
“Best thing about monarchs?” Alex’s words were as tight as her expression. “They come back, every time. I lost you out in that field once, Evangeline. Don’t make me come after you again.”
Charlotte felt as if the entire town had been plunked square down on her chest. She wanted to charge back in the diner, splash cold water on her face in the ladies’ room, and stare herself down until she caved. And stayed. If Charlotte didn’t climb behind the wheel now, she’d spend her life wondering what might have happened.
She lingered on the thought, then loaded herself in the driver’s seat. Part of her wanted the engine to give her fits again, but it wouldn’t, of course. Nash had made sure of it. Even gassed it up, gave it fresh oil, and tucked a newly printed map between the dash and windshield.
Alex and Freesia and Charlotte waited and waved, expectation hanging on the triangle between them. When Charlotte thought she might not breathe from the weight of it, she shifted the gear arm into reverse and puttered backward, suspended on Main.
Around her, Devon moved on. The sun crawled more ambitiously up the horizon. Beyond the diner window, Taffy had already welcomed a new face—a traveler, no doubt, someone Charlotte would never meet—and laughed around a new conversation. At the flower shop where Nash had bought Charlotte the blue hydrangea to plant near the porch, nature’s proof that nothing was meant to return as it was before, sat a miniature wooden windmill and a new display of colorful tulips she would never see open.
A horn sounded behind her. She glanced in the rearview mirror.
Tanner Jacobs, as nice a kid as they came, gave her a polite wave.
Charlotte shifted into drive and pressed the gas.
One block changed to two. Before long, a mile crept up and the town fell away.
At the city limit sign, Charlotte choked out a sob. A little like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane: 99 percent fear, 1 percent elation.
She pulled a marigold flier from her purse. Last night, the online journal entry put the caravan in Kosciusko. Daddy’s truck willing, Charlotte would be there before her stomach growled out for banana bread.
* * *
“Where is he going?” Charlotte asked Alex. She had only just seen Daddy in the kitchen. He helped her find her unicorn in the pocket of her dress.
“See? Had it with you all along.” Daddy said. “Off to bed now.”
Charlotte hugged his gray trousered leg. The material scratched her cheek. “Read me ’Vangeline?”
“Not tonight, sweetheart.”
“Tomorrow?”
“If you’re a good girl and do everything you’re supposed to.”
“Can I have ice cream?”
“It’s too late.”
He shooed her out of the kitchen, up the stairs. Near the door sat a bag Mama once put her clothes in to go to Grandma’s house. Charlotte hesitated at the landing.
“Are you going to see Grandma?” asked Charlotte.
“I don’t know.” Daddy looked sad. “Be good, baby.”
He waited at the bottom of the stairs until Charlotte climbed in Alex’s bed. The door latched. His truck started.
Charlotte and Alex ran to her balcony. The night was cold. Charlotte slipped her legs between the iron railing and pressed her head between two rails, as far as it allowed her to see the road. Neither spoke until the red lights behind his truck disappeared like spent fireflies.
“He’s going to Grandma’s,” she told Alex.
Alex’s face twisted up. She couldn’t get her legs through the railing anymore so she sat beside Charlotte, cross-legged, her strawberry nightgown stretched like a yummy trampoline between her knees. “What makes you say that?”
“He had the going bag.”
“A suitcase?”
“Yeah,” said Charlotte. “He’ll be back tomorrow night. Read me ’Vangeline.”
After a few minutes, Alex stood. Her bare feet padded across the hall. She returned with a book, a flashlight, and a blanket. Carousel horses, because they held magic. Alex opened the book.
“This is the forest primeval,” she read. “The murmuring pines and hemlocks—”
“What’s prime ebil?” Charlotte interrupted.
“Well, prime means one so maybe it was the first forest.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
That made it extra magical. Charlotte snuggled under cover.
Alex began again. “The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight…”
* * *
Charlotte found the closest thing to Taffy’s Diner that Kosciusko had to offer: Sugar Booger Bakery. She had entertained visiting the chamber of commerce office or the local library, but already playing catch-up, she needed the superhighway of gossip to find Steven’s caravan. After a muffin that might have been improved on with sawdust, and a lukewarm cup of coffee, Charlotte had her gossip. Once, “dat flutterby feller”—what Sugar Booger’s owner, Barb, called Steven—had given an impromptu presentation at the local elementary school, one of the local do-gooders and butterfly lovers—the Charlotte Strickland of Attala county—had convinced the caravan to stay for the night near the city cemetery.
“Graves for Monarchs, what she calls it,” Barb had said.
Charlotte knew the movement well: convince people to plant milkweed near their loved one’s graves. As thanks for a protected and thriving food source, monarchs would bestow their delicate beauty and grace upon the grounds to heal visitors’ spirits. Outside the massive stone entrance to the cemetery, parked as she was behind a black truck with a colorful trailer—damned butterfly on the side, bigger than shit—Charlotte should have been sipping the nectar of adventure. Mostly, she just felt sugar stomach from it all.
Why had she come? Because she wanted the Sea King ride exactly the way Alex had described it—all glossy turquoise with glitter rainbow letters and mermaid fins painted on the side? Because she’d had nowhere else to go? Was this how Daddy felt on his journey—the dissatisfaction that no amount of distance eased, along with merciless thoughts of home?
Barb’s sawdust muffin made a strong argument for a comeback right about the time people began to gather at the butterfly trailer. Beyond the windshield of Daddy’s truck, Dr. Steven Morneau turned his backside to her and reached inside for some equipment. The Charlotte that cast late-night stares at her computer screen and fantasized about where the man’s tan lines would give way to paler skin was nowhere to be found. Instead, her tongue and sweat glands had turned on the spigot of impending doom while some lady—no doubt Kosciusko’s resident do-gooder—beyond the glass said, “Miss, are you okay?” Charlotte vowed to never betray Taffy by eating at another establishment again if only the nausea gods saw fit to back off. Her stomach bucked and fought this notion. A bit of a crowd rounded her bumper, all headed toward the driver’s side, her Eduardo Reyes leading the charge.
Charlotte opened the car door and gave up her stomach contents to the gravel road. And a pair of stylish hiking boots—black with neon orange laces, of all things, until, well…
To Steven Morneau’s credit, he didn’t react like a man who’d just been coated with questionable muffin and java. He was a man of science. He helped her from the truck, moved her to a shady spot beneath the closest oak tree—a concrete bench dedicated to someone named Howard Gauthier, beloved husband, and secured a bottle of cold water, which he even opened for her. For Charlotte’s part, she thought swapping places with Howard Gauthier would be preferable to staring down her fantasy guy dressed in puke breath and a stifling coat of humiliation.
“It’s the heat,” Steven said. “I don’t know how you get used to it here. I’m a fan of Canadian mona
rch season, myself.”
His voice was refined, not at all the cultured accent she’d imagined, but polished nonetheless. At some point in fetching her a drink, he had availed himself of his boots. He sat beside her and brought with him a fidgety energy that percolated beneath the surface—knees bouncing, gaze roaming, bare toes twitching.
In her current state of lethargy, she found it draining, craved Nash’s stillness.
Charlotte drizzled out an apology, a thanks, maybe the recitation of the monarch brigade’s code of conduct, she couldn’t be sure, and guzzled the water. The blessedly cold liquid set things to rights inside her. She couldn’t say the same for her entrance.
“Are you here for the monarchs?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Exquisite creatures, aren’t they? Of course, they don’t realize it. They carry all their beauty on their backs for others to see.”
Charlotte had never thought of butterflies in such a way. Almost as if they were the most selfless creatures imaginable.
“So many changes they must go through to be here, in this moment.”
A philosopher, as well. Was there no end to his allure?
“My father used to call them little self-propelled…”
Steven hopped off the bench and chased one, more a practiced stalk. He disappeared behind a tall headstone.
“…flowers.” Charlotte’s words died, unceremoniously buried.
She stayed in place for long minutes, thinking Steven would return. At times, she’d catch glimpses of him writing things down in his notebook or instructing one of his followers on the correct procedure to capture and tag. Maybe it was the heat, but Charlotte’s mind strayed. She pictured Nash beside her, stretched out beneath the shade, eyes closed, fingers clasped loosely over what she knew to be his firm stomach, no tan lines, content to simply be. He would have squinted his eyes open at her every so often to check on her, given words to his concern a few times by asking if she was all right, offered her a breath mint he always carried in his pocket alongside his handkerchief because he intended to kiss her sadness away. And listened when she mentioned her daddy. He might have even cracked a joke about her making an improvement to the fair doctor’s boots that weren’t real boots at all because they weren’t cowboy boots.
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 19
