Frances rubbed circles at Alex’s shoulder with her aged hand. A mini-sun in a vast, arctic wasteland.
“We’re sorry, honey. We thought you knew.”
Alex shook her head. Her breath came in short bursts, mourning a sibling she never had, and again, like a rogue wave, a child she’d drove from her own body because a baby didn’t fit into her plans. A sting began at her nose, but she refused to give in to the threatening tears.
“Elias was convinced it was a boy by the way the pregnancy gave your mother such fits from the start,” said Frances.
Alex pictured a boy, aged nineteen, resembling Jonah.
“When they lost the baby, your daddy wanted to stop the room renovation right then. Said it was a painful reminder, but she just kept on in that way of hers, pretending nothing was wrong, until everything came to a head one midnight. They argued about the bluebirds and the measurements and the crumbling walls, but neither of them was talking about wallpaper. They both said things they didn’t mean to hurt the other. Stella Irene always said words that night were like those crumpled bluebirds—capable of straightening back out but forever imprinted.”
Cobwebs cleared. Alex remembered Mama, looking like death one school morning, ashen lips, red eyes, barely able to speak. Alex had tied Charlotte’s shoes that day because her little fingers were shaking with worry about Mama. By afternoon, their mother seemed better. Not herself but better. A few weeks later, Alex and Charlotte began their vigil on the balcony.
“That advice up there,” said Bernice, “on that second-floor wall, was Stella Irene’s cheeky way of sayin’ that married people sometimes hang wallpaper when they should be communicatin’.”
Alex and Michael had hung wallpaper. The kind that looked patriotic and polished, their very own bluebirds, the perfect political union until it was no longer perfect.
“So you see,” said Taffy, “that space—whatever we choose to call it—was your parents’ way of healing. What better way to heal their marriage than to help other couples come together? Not just for a day or a season but through all of it. Especially the crumpled parts.”
“Dresses from Match Made in Devon carry a special kind of magic,” said Bernie. “A sisterhood of women supportin’ each other through the unpredictable turns of life.”
Frances, in her mini-sun way, added the quietest two cents of all. “Not every story there ends happily ever after. There are tragedies, to be sure. But every woman who walks through those doors and into her marriage knows tremendous love.”
Alex thought of Jonah and Katherine and little Isabel and her heart hurt.
One answer had begat another, Alex’s wallpaper question giving way to truths about why a bridal shop, why then? Her gaze lingered on the contract’s date. November 19, 1989. Every single challenge to her way of thinking circled back to the nuptial nook, the wed-loft, the death-do-us-part dormer. The space was insane. Human-hair-on-a-wreath insane. Why couldn’t Devon accept a change, a store filled with used books or socket wrenches or a tannery that sold boots and belts and saddles? Why wouldn’t Devon let go of its hold on the March family—Alex included?
Hazel gave a humpf, grabbed her enormous belly like she was jiggling a potluck-sized offering of tapioca, and said, loudly, “Well, I don’t know about any of you, but I need some raisin bread French toast if this boxcar has got to run.”
The others laughed.
Alex did not. She felt the disconnect, as surely as if she had been a balloon filled with hot air and let go. A palpable me-versus-truth. The little old ladies crowding her booth, her rational-minded sensibilities, lived in a fantasy world that traded foreclosures and bankruptcies for fanciful dreams and perfect relationships, that—newsflash—weren’t so perfect. The Silver Swarm fancied themselves the guardian angels of marriage when, in reality, they exploited misfortune, like Katherine’s illness, to advance their narrative and perpetuate an exclusive sorority that doomed all who didn’t purchase a wedding dress at Match Made in Devon to a disappointing union. Bully marketing dressed up in Sunday finery.
Alex wanted no part of that business strategy. She gathered her laptop and papers—for good, this time.
The women must have believed they had swayed her into changing her mind. Alex had begun to sink her teeth into the magic as sure as if it were one of Taffy’s cinnamon-pecan rolls. She and Michael had married in Boston, her dress purchased from Lacroix down on Newbury. What if that was the reason they couldn’t find their way back to each other? No-no-no. Christ, that was insane. The women must have believed the second-floor lie would go on in perpetuity, for their jovial expressions when she shoved out of the booth, belongings in hand, and laid out the final terms of her family’s business—her family’s business—proved weaker than the coffee.
“Tell your matrimonial sisterhood they have twenty-four hours to rally and gather up the junk on the shop’s top floor before it ends up in a Second Street dumpster.”
* * *
Bundle in her arms triple-stacked, bag strap slipping down the shoulder of her wool coat, frigid rain droplets splashing her cheeks on Devon’s Main—that was how Michael found her.
Alex answered her cell on the fourth ring, breathless, as if he might hang up.
“Michael?”
She hated the desperate notes in her voice.
“Hey.”
City noise buffeted his sparse greeting.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for five days.” Phone sandwiched between her ear and shoulder, she balanced her load in her left hand and fished her rental car keys out of her bag with her right.
“Listen, I can’t watch Bear anymore.”
Alex stopped short. “What? Michael, you agreed.”
“Soline is allergic, which means I have to keep the dog at your place. That’s an extra hour commute each day. Both ways.”
So much wrong with his statement. His mistress’s name was Soline. Her name sounded like a weight loss supplement, a sodium-based by-product, an exotic dancer, not a fitness instructor with a spray tan from Gloucester and sloppy substitute for Alex. But the dog hit hardest. Michael loved Bear. Or he had, once. The two had been inseparable from the moment Michael found the Belgian shepherd mix as an emaciated puppy, shivering on the tracks of the T. One week into Alex and Michael’s wedded bliss. It had been like living in a snow globe—picture-perfect, insulated, joyful.
“Yeah, well, Bear predates Latrine, or whatever her goddamn name is, by about thirteen years.”
“Classy, Alex.”
“You know me. Can take the girl out of Mississippi….”
After mashing four different buttons on the fob, the rental sedan’s lights flashed and the locks sounded.
Michael sighed. “There’s a great animal hospital with boarding that opened up—”
“No.”
“Be reasonable, Alex.”
“Michael. Be responsible. He doesn’t have much time left. You really want strangers forgetting to give him medicine?” She dropped her armful into the driver’s seat while low, gray clouds emptied above her. “Everything here is taking longer than I thought.”
A beep on the line snatched his response. Something about always and manipulating. She glanced at the phone’s screen. The image was her boss, in a rare moment at the holiday party when he proved to everyone he knew how to smile. And show teeth.
“Michael, I have to go. I have to take this call.”
“Soon, Alex. Get back soon.”
Not because he wants me.
Three beeps and his line cleared. She might have thought the second call dead—her boss’s office was a tomb—if not for his breathing.
“Robert, I’m here.”
“Are you sitting down?”
Her mouth soured. A revisit of Taffy’s gravy congealed in her stomach. No one ever said those words followed by anything good. At least not in her life. Alex shoved her possessions to the passenger seat. She was winded and wet, but she’d be damned if he would detect anything in her voi
ce other than his level-headed right-hand woman, attending to business in a focused vacuum.
“Aima Solutions is about to lose contracts with every major blood supplier in the country.”
Prickles of sweat needled her hairline.
“What? Why?”
“The entire east coast supply was rerouted to a warehouse in Jersey unable to properly store it all. Losses are into the millions.”
Millions was an obtuse word. Flat until the jagged spikes of responsibility hit like blunt force trauma to the chest. In business, millions meant pink slips and CEOs taking nosedives off the Mystic River Bridge.
Alex collapsed into the driver’s seat, her heels still in the gutter. Rain came hard, as hard as her heart chambers knocking against her ribs. The legs of her pantsuit drank in the wetness, but she made no attempt to crawl behind the wheel.
“Alex?”
Somewhere inside, she found her voice. “That’s impossible. The data was solid. We ran simulations at least two dozen times.”
“This isn’t only Aima’s bottom line. We’re talking human life here. We don’t get the right shipments to the right hospitals, people die.”
She knew people died. It was why she was here in this godforsaken town instead of being where she had herself together and no one lost millions. His choice of words—obvious as it was inane—bolstered hers: “It works, Robert. I know it does. There has to be a glitch in the software. Send me what you have, and I’ll pull my team together.”
“We overpromised on the distribution end of this free-market idea, Alex. Overpromised and under delivered.”
“I’ll make it right,” said Alex.
“We need you here. To reassure Aima’s board.”
“I understand, Robert. I want to come at them with the full picture—detailed explanations, answers to foreseeable concerns, an enhanced safety net in place, assurances why this will never happen again. The fastest way I can get to a solution is to address it now, not to be stuck in transit all day.”
“I want an autopsy by the time my head hits the pillow tonight.”
“You’ll have one.”
Robert was a good man. A family man. Pumped every extra dime he made into funding a series of human trafficking safe houses in Central America, a sort of modern underground railroad, because his sister had disappeared from their Chelsea home when she was thirteen. He was a rare gem in business. Never ended an encounter without his usual, take care. This time, the call ended as if she had abducted his future.
Alex tossed her cell on the passenger seat and fished in her bag for her journal. She thumbed through the pages until she found the section of doodles and calculations that had first sparked her Aima idea. The outline of a human form; red pathways—the life force of a company in perfect mimicry to the life force of distribution; vessels the perfect metaphor for the most exquisite transport system ever created; systems coming alive; a beautiful and functioning final step to the free-market economic evolution of human blood.
The journal slipped from her grasp, sailed down her poly-blend, wide pant leg, and landed in the raging curbside river between the tires. She gasped and plucked the notebook free of the torrent, but not before the lower third sustained water damage. Some very un-Devon-esque language swam out of Alex’s lips.
A woman passerby with an umbrella stopped. “Best get that air drying. Paper towel every five pages or so then propped open to a circulating fan should do the trick.”
Alex’s immediate response—mind your own business—came out a diluted “Thanks,” courtesy of Charlotte in her head, accusing her of acting ugly. Alex slammed the car door, white-knuckled the steering wheel, and screamed.
Inside the car’s shell, she roasted inside her wool-blend coat.
She was already due for her appointment with the commercial realtor, but that would have to wait. She had to see a restroom dispenser about some paper towels.
7
Charlotte
Charlotte had only ever seen Alex mad—dying duck fit mad—on three occasions. Once, when Alex found her roaming the field behind their house buzzing milkweed and seemingly dead patches of leaves to scatter late-migration Monarch butterflies when she was supposed to be inside the house, napping. Another time, when Charlotte was sixteen and she snuck out at night with Nash to trap crawdaddies and haul them to a bonfire in the sticks. Both times, Alex’s screaming and carrying on came from a locus of protection deep down inside her. The third occasion, though, happened in semidarkness, just as Charlotte approached the bridal shop door to lock up for the business day. Alex gripped her hand on the door jamb and charged in, same pinched look on her face as the times she hollered, “Mama would’a killed me first and swore me second if you’da drowned in that creek” and “Crayfish ain’t the only thing Nash was looking to trap.”
“Where were you today?” Alex asked.
“Today,” Charlotte mimed, at half-mast to her sister’s volume and intensity. “Well, I didn’t want to tell you, but you’ve forced my hand.”
Alex raised an eyebrow.
“Oprah and I had our nails done then went for tea cakes.”
Eye roll. Just like Charlotte’s twins.
Near the display of winter-toned bridesmaid dresses, Freesia offered up an appreciative snicker.
Charlotte hustled back to the day’s receipts—all ten dollars and twelve cents, based on one sold garter—so she could get home before Nash turned his annoyance into three longnecks and a night watching professional wrestling. “Where do you think? I was here, doin’ my civic duty to prepare women for the glamorous road ahead of air conditioners set to sixty-five and fingernails spit at the carpet.”
“We had an appointment with the realtor at two,” said Alex.
“You had an appointment. You know that business-talk is like a Brooklyn accent spoken through tin can and a string to me.”
“You needed to hear what she had to say. About Devon’s economic prospects. About comparable retail space within a reasonable driving distance. Price per square foot is up for the first time in six years. And there’s a new R & D aerospace facility set to open this summer over in Natchez.”
“Unless R & D stands for ruching and damask, I’m not interested.”
“Which is precisely why you have no business running a business. Charlotte, this shop is more than fluffing tiered gowns and fitting the perfect bun holder.”
“Snood.”
“So not the point.”
Freesia drew close just then. She and Charlotte had been together all day, flipping through glossy wedding catalogues and discussing the merits of bateau versus spaghetti-strap designs between inventory duties Alex had assigned them. It wasn’t quite bonding, but Freesia had taught her some yoga moves and Charlotte thought it might be precisely the right time to stretch.
Her hands trembled.
Charlotte aligned herself to Alex, practiced one cleansing breath, as Freesia had coached, and said, “Maybe it should be the point. You’re so smart, about everything I’ll never understand, but I’m smart, too. About fabrics—the way they look in sunlight versus candlelight and how they stitch together and the length of train appropriate for every ceremony and about people, Alex. Realizing that sometimes a woman in a bad family situation needs a good cry on a warm shoulder. You know balance sheets, but I know brides.”
“No one is doubting that, Charlotte. But the realtor appointment was critical to injecting some much-needed reality into this situation.”
“You never mentioned it until we were expected to be there. And who would have run the shop?”
Alex glanced at Freesia who looked striking in the chandelier light overhead, in the way she pressed her lips together to ride her quiet epiphany, her gaze never wavering from her singular greatest challenge to remaining in Devon: Alex.
“There was never a we, Charlotte,” Freesia said. “At least not one that included me. Two against one were the more favorable odds.”
Alex’s stare crumbled away.
/> “In the same way there was never a we before an army of women stampeded upstairs this afternoon to label and pack everything into boxes.” Charlotte attacked the cluttered register area like she did her home five minutes before guests—with a basket to toss everything into and forty miles of hard purpose ahead of her. “Just because you know the price per square foot doesn’t mean you’re the only one who gets a say. If you don’t start including us in these things, I’ll be plum outta give-a-shits ’fore the week is up.”
Only a little part of Charlotte rose up in guilt for cursing.
“We agreed,” said Alex. “One week to make a decision.”
“And you made yours one minute before that.” Charlotte marched over to the reception area and rifled catalogues back into the lean-to plantation shutter, Martha Stewart-style—with the added sour mood of jail time.
“Soon the choice won’t be ours,” said Alex.
“What about Freesia’s dress?”
“One custom dress won’t save the store.”
Alex was on: raised voice, prominent vein jagging down her forehead, ramrod-straight posture. The rafters nearly vibrated with the toxicity she brought, so off from the day’s positive vibe. Charlotte paced back to the ornate rack near the register and sorted hangers by weight because it was mindless and the buzz inside blew her organization pattern to hell.
“It isn’t just one,” said Charlotte. “That bride, Juliet, called today. After Freesia finishes the bridal gown, she wants her to make dresses for six bridesmaids—including an actress that’s been in a Hollywood movie. She was a leading lady for that Mario guy—the one with dimples like a wishing well.”
One satin-wrapped hanger flipped free and slid across the floor.
Freesia scooped it up and placed it back on the rack. “And the woman Charlotte stood up for against the rich bridezilla bully? She told two engaged friends who both booked appointments for next week.”
Her half-sister’s proximity presented a united front. Seemed as good a time as any to say what needed saying.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 6
