Her daddy was away on a trip for steel. Alex didn’t know why people wanted to buy electric steel from him—whatever that was—but he pointed out long sheets on boxcars once when they had stopped for a passing freight train.
“Did you sell those, Daddy?”
He mumbled something. Daddy was rarely at a loss for words.
Those were the days when Mama roamed the most at night. Sometimes Alex counted her steps and wrote them all over the house—notepads, the back of envelopes, the wall in her closet. Each time Daddy went away to sell steel, the number went higher.
High grasses whipped Alex’s knees. She was the fastest runner in third grade. Each time she outpaced herself, Daddy wrote her new time on the garage wall. She liked his face when that happened. Not so much when it didn’t.
Mama said the drought wouldn’t break, but Alex was certain it would that day. Running was the only way to beat the rain. If she got her dress wet, Mama would know and get mad. Wouldn’t be worth the flowers after that.
Alex had gathered a handful by the time the first drops fell. She barely made it under the awning, her body against the trailer’s dirty white panels before the sky opened. Frog-strangler, Mama called these rains, though Alex knew that was just plain wrong. Amphibians would never get into trouble in the rain. She had just settled in to straighten her blossoms when she heard a noise.
The trailer nudged her back like it was moving down the highway instead of broken down in a field.
She needed to puzzle it out. Daddy would’ve wanted that—to know what kind of animal was living in there so he could take care of things. The windows were high; the rain was buckets—what Daddy called it. Ear to the side of the trailer gave her no more clues than she had before. She squirmed along the side to keep out of the rain, careful to keep her dress on an old piece of cardboard instead of the red clay mud that would have Mama fit to be tied. The awning ran the length of one side, where they’d had picnics on their trip to the Grand Canyon the summer before. Charlotte had been too young to understand the importance of a hole opened up in the world. Not Alex.
More noises. They sounded closer. Alex thought she heard a word, two. A voice. Not an animal at all.
At a pipe sticking out of the trailer, she paused. The noise was loudest here, steady, like the rhythms their music teacher taught them for percussion instruments. Alex felt a draft from the pipe. She put her eye to the hole.
She understood people, and they were so close, on the mattress inside, but she couldn’t see faces or legs. She understood they were moving together, like when Charlotte and her wrestled but these two bodies were naked. And the moment she understood that one of them had a body that didn’t look like hers, she gasped and pressed her back to the trailer again.
Her mind replayed it, like one of those stupid puppet songs from Charlotte’s favorite show. Alex tried to think about the rain, anything but what was happening on the other side of that pipe, but the noises tempted her again.
That day. And several days after.
Alex knew she should stay away, that she was seeing something dirty, that she shouldn’t want to see it anymore. But each day she went out, she started to feel things, like drinking a glass of warm milk when you were cold. Day after day, she saw glimpses of private parts and heard words that the boys at school sometimes whispered when the teachers weren’t around and tried to puzzle through noises that sounded like they were hurting each other and being nice, all at once. And day after day, she failed to figure out who it was because she was always on the wrong side of the trailer when the door slammed closed and she had to hide. If Daddy ever caught her, she wouldn’t be his perfect little girl anymore.
She kept her clues inside a shoe box in her room: a ruler marked with the length of a bare footprint she discovered outside the trailer door, a list of men in town she observed with black hair poking out from the top of their shirts; men she heard cuss, especially on nights Mama and Daddy had friends over to play cards. Four weeks on, she was ready to present her findings to Daddy, the grandest puzzle to date.
“Mama came in before supper last night with muddy feet. And you came home yesterday.”
Daddy repositioned his reading glasses. He was pretending to read The Advocate, but his eyes were firmly looking at her, obviously interested in her puzzle.
“So, Mama wears a size eight shoe. Says so on the boxes in her closet.”
“I’m not following, Alexandra.”
Alex sighed, exasperated. “The footprint outside the trailer by the fence is size eight. And it rained yesterday.”
“Mmm.” He went back to reading.
“Don’t you see? It isn’t an animal that’s been moving around in there at all. Mama’s been going out there most days you sell steel.”
He set his newspaper down, told her to go to her room to practice multiplication facts, though she had learned them all the year before. At her window, she heard Daddy rummaging around in the garage that night, saw him put on his headband with the light they used to go scrounge up crawfish in the creek. He didn’t click on the bulb until he was halfway across the open field.
That night, Alex heard arguing in the kitchen. She heard curses and trailer and gone and, once, she heard her name. Her stomach felt like Halloween when she snuck handfuls of candy under her mattress, but she’d only eaten a cheese sandwich. Charlotte snuck into her bed, the first of many nights beneath the carousel horse blanket.
For sixteen days, nothing.
Then, as now, she blamed herself.
If she hadn’t been such a bad little girl, going out those days to the trailer. If she hadn’t been such a bad wife, screwing men who weren’t Michael. If she hadn’t thought perfection achievable, yet again, she might have been happy.
Alex took a last look at her Boston apartment: awash in morning sun, always its best feature; the expanse of marble broken only by the occasional box her doorman promised to ship; a few pieces of furniture her neighbor would come for after she was gone. Without a salary, she could no longer afford its luxury, and taking one dime more from Michael for him to keep up appearances was a crime worse than delusion. Besides, she was needed elsewhere.
She nudged Bear’s leash. “Come.”
Bear whined, hesitated.
Alex crouched before him. “No more cold weather on your bones. And a big field. Biggest you’ve ever seen.” For some reason, that made her nose sting.
He slathered her face with appreciative licks.
They stopped only once before the long drive south. Her photo lacked the warmth and innocence of Isabel’s collection. Alex couldn’t help thinking that her expression looked rather jaded to match her sentiment that she had given the city everything and received nothing from her in the end—but a George Washington bronze in the Public Garden, financial district buildings in the background, was iconic. And a promise kept.
Not the sort of collateral damage for which Alex was known.
16
Charlotte
The produce section of the Food Saver, five minutes before closing time, was the last place Charlotte thought Alex would come clean about Boston. Her sister pushed the basket like she was leading a funeral procession to honor forsaken carbohydrates. As gastrointestinal dictator of her household, Charlotte made it a point to shop exclusively at the store’s periphery. But a two-week old secret spilled out on aisle twelve.
“I got fired.”
Charlotte thought Alex said she was tired or was talking about the gallon of milk riding in the basket at her fingertips, expired. For one, her sister never divulged anything personal; and for two, Alex went to the second floor of the shop each day to carry out her busywork. Charlotte thought it important enough to stop her adrenaline-fueled supermarket sweep to clarify.
“What?”
Alex drifted away from the anchor of the cart and sagged inside a fake-grass display designed for everything parents would need for the upcoming baseball season—a fold-up chair surrounded by game snacks and sports
drinks. Not a bottle of Xanax in sight, so they’d really missed the demographic on this one. Charlotte looked closely at her sister and put it together: black cap pulled low over Alex’s brow, hair jacked through the back opening, jeans—almost a never in Alex’s book, skin as white as the Michael Bublé piped through the store’s speakers. If Charlotte didn’t know any better, she’d think her sister was a dugout mom on a bender.
She had said fired.
Charlotte felt the weight on her shoulders.
The store’s lights dimmed and turned back on. An announcement urged shoppers to make their final selections. It was cute how management thought that would happen when Charlotte was on the cusp of Alex opening up to her. She joined her at the display, settling her backside on the strip of plastic grass beside her sister.
“Oh, honey. Want me to send him a present from Tibbs?”
Alex smirked. Bless her heart, she thought retaliating with ostrich droppings was a joke. Charlotte opened a nearby bag of cheese puffs, ate one, and angled the bag toward Alex. The powdery white-cheddar starch bomb was a mouthgasm.
“What happened?”
Her sister extracted a cheesy fistful. Around chews, she said, “I screwed up. Also, they didn’t appreciate my vision. It wasn’t like I put drones in the warehouse to distribute blood—although….”
Damned if she wasn’t considering it. One pint of blood dropped from a drone clip would’ve turned any warehouse into the soundstage on a slasher film. Charlotte didn’t go there. “Always were ahead of your time.”
The lights flashed three more times—aggressively, if such a thing were possible with florescent bulbs. Michael Bublé cut to silence, no longer “feeling good.”
“You mark my words. That boss of yours didn’t know what he had until it was gone.” Charlotte popped open a nearby can of grape cola. She took a swig and passed it to Alex. “Like I’m regretting this salt. Oof, I’ll retain enough water to float a battleship with these. But I’ll tell you one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The flipside of regret. You don’t know what you’re missing until you find it. I predict you’ll find it here.”
“Devon?”
She said Devon as if it was geographically situated on the underside of a sweaty man’s balls.
The announcement repeated, verbatim. Charlotte went another round with the puffs and soda.
“I know it’s not the cradle of the founding fathers and this here fake grass is a sloppy substitution for Fenway Park, but it wasn’t that long ago when the people here were your people.”
Which was right about the time that Cal Gould poked his head around the mayonnaise display, his expression as pasty as the jarred contents, and said, “Some of us haveta be gettin’ home, Charlotte.”
“How’s that sweet daughter of yours, Cal?”
Cal’s expression shifted, scowl to smile. “She’s good.”
“I recall she wasn’t that sweet when she was picking out her prom dress in my store. Now, I know low blood sugar must have given her those grumpies because you’re such a kind man, but I had to return an expensive dress to the manufacturer that day, at a loss, for lipstick smears—intentional, because she’d written a word in the dress, Cal. A word that would just about make your pastor sprout wings and juggle halos. I believe you can spare a few minutes.”
Cal’s smile, on slow-deflate the more Charlotte spoke, was downright saggy by the time she made her request. “Take all the time you need.” He backed out of view, behind the mayo.
“What does Michael say about this?”
“He’s angry that I gave up the apartment.”
“Where does he stay?”
“Where doesn’t he stay?”
Charlotte read it in her tone—he had someone on the side, maybe more than one. She could have predicted it when she met him, engaging in conversations on a surface level, like he was always trying to corral votes, walking in front of Alex so the camera flashes caught him first. Daddy’s indiscretion shifted into perspective, how it must have hit Alex, how sometimes betrayal comes in cycles and hits far too close to home.
“It’s funny…the moment I realized I had to get out of Boston, I didn’t consider going anywhere else.”
Charlotte reached for her hand. “The way I see it, home is a soft place to fall and no one questioning you at the bottom.”
Alex’s mouth stretched, not quite a smile but close.
Charlotte’s phone rang then. Nash. Though he couldn’t have known sisterly support delayed her, probably just wanting his dinner, his invasion into the moment made her want to curl up on the plastic turf and camp for the night, for the year—hell, spoon with Cal if he had better teeth. She silenced the rings, pushed his call to voicemail, then chased the hypocrisy from her tongue with a swig of grapey goodness. Nash was no longer her soft place to fall or a silent word at the bottom. Nearly three weeks on and not a day went by that her city limit escapade wasn’t brought up in some judgmental fashion. Her fantasies of late shifted from driving past the city limit sign to flooring it, Fast and Furious-style, and driving until the fuel tank dripped dry. But she would never do that to her kids. Not the way Daddy did to Charlotte and Alex as girls.
Cal loaded their cloth bags and sent them out into the parking lot with a decisive latch of the metal doors. In Daddy’s truck, the glove compartment rattled open in the commotion of loading. Darned map fell out again.
“What’s this?” asked Alex.
“Freesia’s been leaving town regularly, every Saturday after the shop closes. Never says where she’s going, but each time that map falls out, a new place is crossed out.”
“This isn’t any old map, Charlotte. This is the one from Mama and Daddy’s things. From their marriage story on the second floor. See the worn-out fold lines? Daddy’s handwriting?”
“She told me she was exploring the area.”
“What’s with the names? They’re all men.”
Charlotte shrugged.
“Think she’s seeing someone?”
For a split-second, it crossed Charlotte’s mind that men, as a destination, might be a journey better than wet ribs in Memphis. “I think she’s looking for answers. She doesn’t have years’ worth of clues or a handwritten letter.”
Charlotte couldn’t see Alex’s face much, what with the black hat and the truck’s dome light blinding them, but she didn’t need x-ray vision to know Alex hadn’t opened her letter.
“They aren’t just her answers. Mama and Daddy’s story belongs to us all. And the fact that she’s not telling us anything about where she goes doesn’t sit right with me. If she wants us to start treating her like a sister, she needs to act like one.”
“Like laughing at the other’s taste in music and pretending I wasn’t our parents’ favorite?”
Alex flashed her a sarcastic grin that died almost immediately. “I mean giving us reasons to trust her. We know almost nothing about her. We don’t even know if her story is true—about Camilla and Daddy and St. Simmons Island. And if she’s learning things about why Daddy left those days, she should be telling us, not keeping secrets.”
The three of them were a tricycle: connected by a framework, on the same journey to re-navigate their childhood; Charlotte, somehow the front wheel, responsible for steering them clear of hurtful obstacles; Alex and Freesia following parallel, never any intention to cross paths; all of them, at times, childlike with grief. One wrong jerk of the handlebars could send them careening off with skinned knees for life.
“What about a soft place to fall and no one questioning you at the bottom?”
“This isn’t her home, Charlotte. This is ours. What’s left of Mama and Daddy. I think we should follow her. See where she goes. Make sure we can trust her before we let her in here.” Alex pointed to the spot above her heart.
Charlotte squirmed under Alex’s manipulation. Her sister was always good at appealing to her rampant quest to love all things, even forgiving Cal’s daughter after
her twat graffiti inside a Prudence Motyk special edition ethereal dress in baby blue. Wasn’t Nash always telling her she trusted too much, too soon? Impulsive with kindness, Mama called it.
“Conditions?” Charlotte said.
“Name them.”
A game they had always played. Primary negotiations. Everything from Girl Scout cookie sales zones to sneaking out of the house as teenagers.
“We stay out of sight. I don’t want her knowing we don’t trust her.”
“Done.”
“Nash can’t know. I’m already in the doghouse when it comes to Freesia.”
“Done.”
“And after this, after you see what I see in her, you stop thinking of her as the enemy.”
This negotiation had Alex’s hat brim dipped low. After a time, she nodded. “Agreed.”
“Good. Now, when we go in the door, I’ll need you to tell Nash you had a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Something embarrassing with a lot of body fluids. Preferably a female issue. He’ll disappear faster than antacids on Taffy’s jambalaya day.”
Charlotte meant it as a joke, meant to elicit a smile. Mostly, Alex just frowned.
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
This was not how it was supposed to go down. First, Alex would spill everything about her life in Boston. Then, Nash would come to an epiphany of appreciation in Charlotte’s delay—I made the kids dinner, I know how hard you worked today, hell, I even rinsed off my peanut butter knife. Mama always told her to leave a little wiggle room for disappointment in a marriage because no one was perfect. Course, that went both ways. Nash never got that memo.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 14
