“Mrs. Leighton…”
“Alex.” Her still-legal moniker always reminded her of who she had been, back when she believed she might solve everything.
Grant pressed his lips together. “Alex, I know this is a difficult time for us all.”
“Your parents dead, too, Clement Grant, Esquire?”
Grant opened and closed his lips, leaving them to resemble a deflated tire.
“Alex, please…” Charlotte whispered.
From the corner, Daddy turned from watching the snow fall outside the window and chuckled. Always did get her sense of humor. She couldn’t make out the laugh lines around his pale gray eyes. A detail lost since the moments when he would sit beside her in Boston Common, on the steps to the bandstand, and offer her his handkerchief, embroidered with initials they shared in jumbled order. Stop giving that mouth of hers an audience, Mama would say if she were here. But she wasn’t. She was here only on paper.
“I’ve known your parents for a long time,” said Grant. “Your father sold me insurance. Your mother sold my wife a wedding dress.”
Alex looked at his left hand. No ring. She glanced up at his photos. Endearing displays of the Second Amendment at work, posed with animal carcasses. Not one woman but Big Auntie in front of her waffle house.
“So much for the shop’s urban legend of everlasting bliss.”
“Alex,” Charlotte snapped.
“This isn’t about me, Alex. This is about you and your sister coming to an understanding about your mother’s wishes.”
Beside her, the stranger crossed her legs. Her sweet scent lured Alex back into awareness. Flypaper.
A clue, Daddy. Why is she familiar? First known parameter? She knew Mama, somehow. Second known parameter?
“Exactly what are those wishes, Mr. Grant?” asked Charlotte.
Freesia was young. Younger than Charlotte. Work backward, Alexandra.
Alex turned to the intruder. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Freesia Day’s spoken words were peaceful. Alex seized on the math, calculating an intricate framework for numbers, trusted numbers. This placed her around the time the shop opened, after Daddy quit his traveling job to stay in Devon, after those nights beneath a blanket, blinking Morse code from her flashlight over Charlotte’s sleeping head for Daddy to find his way home. After, but only just after.
Second known parameter? Twenty-eight, Daddy. And she has your eyes.
Oh, no.
Alex’s entire body went cold; a naked, exposed kind of cold, though she was firmly planted in Clement Grant’s stylized version of purgatory, her feet stretching roots into his patterned rug. Big Auntie’s photo blurred. At the window, Daddy turned away.
“She wanted you three to become acquainted,” Grant offered lamely, to fill the room with something, anything.
Blood vessels at Alex’s eardrum magnified her pulse. She pressed the heels of her palms to her forehead to counter the pressure building behind her skull.
“After she was gone.” Perfect.
“I believe the letters should explain.”
Explain how a man could leave his wife, his two young daughters on an iron balcony in mid-November, and bed another woman?
Alex looked at the window. Elias March was gone.
She stood, stormed the window, to breathe where he had lingered, to understand. White stars veiled her vision—flakes beyond the panes of glass or a by-product of the heaviness between her ears—she couldn’t be sure. Alex wanted to yank at bulky book bindings, send them tumbling off the shelves onto Clement Grant and the letters and this perfect woman who seemed an absolute glacier in the face of news that threatened to bury Alex. As fast as the temptation took hold and the vision stretched to its satisfying but imperfect conclusion, the pain in Alex’s head subsided. The first rule of solving the unsolvable was to have a plan. All pieces showing. Know what you have.
Alex turned to the woman. “Where are you from?”
“Georgia. Saint Simmons Island.”
“Who is your mother?”
Freesia looked at Grant. “Do I have to answer?”
Grant stood, hands spread as if to catch himself, the situation, from tumbling headlong into something messy.
“Alex, the letter…” Charlotte’s turn at dialing back everything.
“Screw the letter, Charlotte. I want to hear it from her.”
Freesia gathered up her bag, fit it cross-ways along her long torso, and aimed for the door. Even in exit, she moved scripted, magnificent.
“Alex! What’s gotten into you?”
“Tell her, Miss Day. Tell her because she doesn’t get it. Grief clouds her some days so much she can’t see what’s in front of her.” Alex was shouting now, her words punctuated by the open office door kicking back against the wall, the tearing of paper as Charlotte ripped into her envelope. “Tell her this out de way circumstance. How Daddy drove his truck away and forgot us all.”
Freesia stopped in the next room, a waiting room filled with gurgling fountains and liquid jazz designed to make people feel better about their lives falling apart in the eyes of the law. She turned in profile. Her chin trembled.
“Tell her…” Alex pleaded, her voice quieter now.
Charlotte looked up from her letter. Soundlessly, she navigated chairs pushed back in chaos, Alex’s flawed stance. Charlotte’s sensible shoes squeaked damp against the waiting room tile. Alex’s baby sister, ill-prepared for what the world outside Devon brought her, pulled Freesia Day into the warmest of summer-like embraces, her letter from Daddy loose and forgotten in her hand.
“You’re our sister.”
2
Alex
In winter, darkness came fast.
Air inside the bridal shop was stuffy. Too much heat coming from the old furnace. Alex would have to do something about that if the seller’s sheet required a report of the last three months’ utilities. Mama always liked it warm. Said hard nipples and white organza shouldn’t happen on the same bride at the same time. The sight of the inventory, hanging like specters in the unlit space pricked tears at the back of Alex’s eyes but they never fully formed. They hadn’t since, well….
Match Made in Devon sat a stone’s throw from the town square. Historic enough to be placed on the registry; proud enough to refuse the honor. Stella Irene was not a woman who took kindly to the strict parameters the historic committee placed on the property that squeezed out all freedom of choice—that included but was not limited to the shade of paint on the doors and trim and columns—phlegm, if Alex was honest; buff, if Charlotte fell in line with what Mama called the color. Half of the second floor’s brick façade boasted a weathered oak, wrap-around balcony used for absolutely nothing but hanging twinkle lights in December. Inside, the balcony theme continued with a hole cut out in the upper floor’s center, better suited for additional seating in a bar—what it had been before Mama got her harebrained idea—than anything of practicality for bridal couture. The fact that Mama made use of it as a place to advance matrimonial superstition said everything there was to say about the woman. Everything except why she gave a third of the March legacy to the product of her husband’s infidelity.
Alex’s lungs emptied. She took off her coat and sagged against the counter.
Jesus, Daddy.
The shopkeeper’s bell sounded at the door. Charlotte entered, hugging a bundle of papers as if anything in Grant’s legal file could atone for leaving them this hot mess. She made a series of declarations to protest the cold, none of them sensical, none of them curses.
“I thought you’d go home,” Alex said.
“Do you want me to go home?”
“I want to go home.”
“Boston.”
“Where else?”
The room, the heat, grew oppressive. The secret was a twenty-pound synthetic-blend gown with meringue sleeves and a never-ending train, crowding out the space, begging to be discussed but so very unpleasant.
“You were ugly back there,” said Charlotte. “That’s not how we were raised.”
“We were raised on lies. You’ll forgive me if I forgot to invite Daddy’s bastard child over for tea on the verandah.”
This time, the door had missed the bell. Freesia stood on the step outside the entry, hands inside her draped pockets, listening, waiting to be invited in, every bit the statue she had been at the cemetery. Charlotte must not have closed the door.
Dammit.
Charlotte’s baby pink lips froze in the same muted O as attendees at an outburst at the speak-now part of a wedding ceremony.
Alex wanted to tell Freesia that she was letting in the cold, to close the door—preferably in front of her—but ugly was not something she would be accused of twice in the same meltdown. She didn’t know how to bridge the flash flood of dark messages assaulting her mind with words, so she rubbed her hands along her upper arms and aimed for the door. Antique knob in hand, she stepped aside and nodded for Freesia to enter.
Their half-sister moved inside, her chin leveled, her eyes caged, thoughtful, deliberate. She made no move to remove her bag, her coat, her guard; she might have been a still-life painting hanging in a high-end gallery on Newbury Street had Alex not heard her breathing, slowly and evenly, above the wind outside.
Pine boards snapped beneath Alex’s steps, cautious now to match her mouth.
“Welcome to our…” Charlotte caught herself. Our, as in three-ours, not two. “…our shop. Here since ’93. Only bridal store for thirty-seven miles. Best one for hundreds. Some say best ever, seeing as how the upstairs is somewhat regional folklore. Got a mention in Brides Weekly three years ago last July.”
“Jesus, Char, she isn’t here for a tour.”
“Maybe she came for an apology,” said Charlotte. “She sure as all get-out deserves one.”
“She can speak for herself.” Freesia’s tone wasn’t acrid. It wasn’t bitter or muted or strained. She simply shot every one of those five verbal arrows straight. If Alex didn’t loathe the idea of her so much, they might be friends.
“How do you know our mother?” asked Alex.
“She found me.”
“How?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“Did you know?”
“That I didn’t have a father? Yeah, I figured that out.”
Daddy would have appreciated her wit, if not her sly commentary on parental responsibility. Her response changed the rules, leveled the playing field. As bad as Alex and Charlotte hurt, they hadn’t grabbed hold of all the pain. The long-lost sister brought the sting too close. Alex wanted to feel things again, but not these things, and she wanted Freesia to leave.
“How do we know you are who you say?” asked Alex.
“I mailed in a DNA sample as a condition of the estate.”
“Daddy has no living relations left. You’d have to match your DNA to one of us or one of Charlotte’s children to be sure.”
Freesia glanced at Charlotte.
In the mother-of-the-bride armchair, a royal-looking wingback affectionately known as the bawling and stonewalling spot, Charlotte slumped, purse on her lap, as if she anticipated a long, drawn-out take-down until she could get back to serving her husband, Nash, his dinner. “Grant said something about settling the estate properly in accordance with Mama’s wishes. He caught me in a moment of grief. I didn’t ask.”
A chandelier—the room’s only light source—streaked inside Alex’s vision. She shut her eyes.
This three-way impasse could take a forever of moments, and it still wouldn’t be enough to get the image of Daddy’s hands on another woman out of Alex’s head. It had been hard for Alex to accept culpability in her husband, Michael’s, adultery—hell, in her own—but living as they chose, married in name only, hurt no one. Daddy’s choice had left a trail of hurt from the east coast all the way back to that iron balcony.
When in doubt, check the numbers. Alex met Freesia’s stare.
“How much do you want?”
Freesia’s look leveled Alex as if she had suggested they go halfsies on a counterfeit-slash-bootlegging operation. “A bribe?”
“Your third of the business.”
“I don’t want money.”
“What do you want? A family? Because you won’t find that here. We were a lifetime, Charlotte and me. You were once in that lifetime.”
“He loved my mother.”
“Is that what you told yourself most nights? Because most nights, our daddy was here.”
“Except for the nights he wasn’t.”
The exchange was smooth, almost practiced, which was insane because no one had seen the betrayal coming.
“You don’t belong,” said Alex.
Freesia paused, scowled. “Because I’m mixed race?”
Alex blinked back the wildly misguided assumption that this had anything to do with race. Elias and Stella Irene had raised their daughters to be colorblind. “Because you exist.”
“Stop.” Charlotte stood. Her purse spilled onto the hardwood floor. She made no move to catch the rolling lipstick and spilled breath mints. “Both of you. Stop.”
Alex became attuned to the silence. Then the furnace kicking on. The whole thing couldn’t have felt more awkward. Charlotte could always be counted on to fill emptiness with chatter.
“Now I may not be good with legal mumbo jumbo or be good with numbers, but I have diffused a fight or two in my day between the stubborns at my house. It ain’t all takin’. There’s got to be a peace offering, words or otherwise.”
It took ages for anyone to move. Freesia was first. She reached into her bag, pulled out a small, yellowed photograph, and laid it on the wood countertop some distance away from Alex. She didn’t want to see anything of Daddy’s sixteen lost days—not St. Simmons Island, not Freesia’s mother, not even his expression. Especially not his expression. If he looked happy, Alex might never dig out from under that snowbank.
Charlotte, however, wanted to know too much—where was it taken? Was it cold on the Georgia coast in November? How old was your mother? Charlotte asked too many questions in her innocent, mindless way that Alex never wanted to know—about the pier and the lighthouse in the background, how they wore sleeves because the gyres draw a chill off the Atlantic most nights, how Camilla Day had been a waitress the same age as their mother, how the story went that she saw a man walking into the sea at dusk, tears streaming down his face—I’m sorry, Daddy. It’s my fault—and how the waitress called him back to the shore and brought him inside for coffee to warm him. Freesia gave and gave, long past a peace offering, long past Alex’s stomach turning on itself, long past anything Alex would ever give in return.
When the room again fell into a silence that made Alex squirm, Charlotte prompted. “Alex?”
Alex had nothing but a truth that was safe, removed.
“When I saw you at the cemetery, I wanted to know you.”
“And now?”
Alex drifted, wondering if it was still possible, knowing this woman with her daddy’s eyes. She decided it wasn’t. Knowing her meant not knowing her daddy. Not really.
“I have to go.” Alex shrugged into her coat, reminded herself her bags were packed in the rental already, no intention of ever staying, certainly not for this.
“But the snow…” said Charlotte.
“Isn’t such a rarity in Boston. I’ll drive out of it, to New Orleans. Catch a plane there.”
“You can’t leave now,” protested Charlotte. “What about the brides who are counting on us for their weddings? We haven’t even discussed the shop.”
“What’s to discuss?” Alex said. “We sell, split whatever is left three ways after debts are paid, and get on with our lives.”
“Just because this shop doesn’t fit into your life doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit into ours.”
“Buy out my third,” said Alex.
“With what? Nash barely makes enough for us to scrape out a living.”
>
“What about the sale of the house? You’ll have that money.”
“Now you’re talking about selling the house?”
“That’s what people do, Charlotte. Parents die and children move on.”
“Listen to yourself.” Charlotte picked that moment to kneel and corral her belongings, pitching items back in her bag like she was one softball away from moral victory in a knock-over-a-bottle game. “What happened to you? You used to love this place, the people in it. Now you’re in some fancy high-rise fifteen hundred miles from home, not one mention of Michael since you’ve been home, barely a word for your nieces and nephew. Have you been gone so long that you can’t remember anything about the person you were when you left?”
The pulse in Alex’s neck thrummed. Charlotte’s stare was wide, glassy. Freesia made a move to help Charlotte, but Charlotte waved her off. Freesia’s gaze sought Alex, drilled her, distilled her down in her mind to the little girl who had caused Daddy to leave, whose reckless flaws sent him into the ocean.
“You know what? Keep my third of the shop. It’s only fair to balance out the Ivy League tuition and looking after Mama the way you did.”
Alex thought backing down, generosity, would cause Freesia to turn away, but her stare remained.
Bag contents back in order, Charlotte did a slow rise to her feet. “I may want to sell.”
This time, Charlotte’s twang ambled out on a whisper. Typical. Sweet Potato Pie Queen, back-to-back years. Also, the Queen of Indecisiveness, thirty-four years running.
“Remember when we were kids and we’d flip a coin when we couldn’t decide something? Mama said it was the best way to make any decision because you’d know, right there with that coin in the air, what your heart wanted most.” Charlotte drew close, close enough to lay soft hands at Alex’s shoulders, their signal for listen. Really listen. “This ain’t ice cream and sno-cones, Alex. I don’t even have the coin in the air yet. It’s still in my pocket. It might be in Freesia’s pocket, too.”
Alex slipped free a few steps, paced, returned. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you, the old you, here. I want to make room in my heart for a sister I didn’t know I had, and I want you to try, too.” She smiled at Freesia.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 2
