“When did you become someone else? The girl I fell in love with had no issue crossing fields with a tall glass of sweet tea and climbing up on that tractor over there…”
He pointed at the 584 International, red and white and grime, flat tire, half under a tarp. As if she needed reminding how they’d met, how their entire story was on display on the second floor of Match Made in Devon as a paragon of marital bliss.
“…and hanging out at the creek until nothing made sense but being inside each other. When did this life we created, together, become such a disappointment to you?”
Even drunk, Nash distilled words and battles to truth far better than Charlotte.
“It isn’t a disappointment, Nash. I just got lost along the way. And then Freesia came…”
“And you found yourself.”
A statement more than a question. How could they all have come so far since that day last winter when a half sister she knew nothing about had entered her life and yet still be circling the same pasture?
“She’s a stranger, Char. She dresses like no one else around here and brings stories of faraway places you’ve only ever read about in them novels with the fancy lettering and bare-chested men on the cover. I get it. But her world ain’t yours.”
“Why can’t it be?”
“We have responsibilities, Char. Decisions we made long ago, together, to raise a family and build on land where we could live out our days. To take care of animals with long lifespans and bank notes that last even longer. They aren’t decisions easily undone.”
Charlotte remembered the children, an acre or more away, how the barn muffled sounds, and the freedom fueled her. “You think this is easy?”
“No, nothing about this is easy. Not for the past year, anyway.” Nash messed with his hair, tangled it and dragged it down across his taut forehead, riddled with lines. “I love you, but I can’t come in last place anymore.”
The fire whiskey talking.
“You’re being dramatic. Alex won’t need my help forever. Just while Maddie’s a baby.”
Before she remembered the decision to move, she was at the tractor, pulling the tarp over parts exposed, concealing the parts left to decay.
“Jonah has practically begged her to start the life with him he wanted all those years ago,” said Nash.
“It’s different.”
“How? Jonah raised a daughter.”
“And so did you. Tell me, do you remember the secret to getting a baby to latch? What to do when your nipples crack and bleed and the thought of the baby’s next feeding brings tears to your eyes?”
Ever uncomfortable with the trappings of being a woman, Nash hung his neck. “You’ve made your point.”
But she hadn’t. Not even close. “It’s a woman who’s been a mother telling you you’ll be fine when you’re scared out of your mind that you’ll mess it all up. It’s family and it’s comfortable and safe. I had your mother and Mama to lean on.” Charlotte stopped futzing with the tarp. Wouldn’t cover it all, anyway. Not by half, but it gave her the space to rein in her voice. “Has it been so long that you’ve forgotten the late nights? The sleep deprivation? The sense of isolation, like the entire world is moving on without you?”
“Yesterday ain’t so long ago.”
Nash’s gaze met hers. His honesty, coupled with a hangdog expression somewhere between vulnerable and macho pout, was a little like a long-in-the-tooth model that still had the right stuff to sell cologne in the tractor supply circular. Charlotte nearly caved. Nearly. But the comradery of the past year, the strength required to claw herself out of her grief, her renewed sense of purpose—her sisters—wouldn’t permit her to circle back to the yes woman she had always been.
“It’s only for a season. The store needs me. Alex needs me.”
“I need you.”
Lord, but the man was a well-hung toddler. “For what? To move the kids from point A to point B? To exchange the same tired looks across the dinner table? To turn off the ag report on the radio at night because you’ve fallen asleep? To wash your clothes and scrape the ostrich dung out of your boots?”
“Milkshake has a high-risk pregnancy. You know the weeks leading up require a change of diet and booster shots and a bunch of other things to protect her and the calf. That’s on top of daily chores and tilling the berseem clover and fixing every damn thing around here that’s broke. I can’t do it alone, Char.”
“Allison has been begging to help you.”
Nash sagged his shoulders and spun away like she had suggested her dead mother’s geriatric squad, the Silver Swarm, crowd their plot of land and hold a charity bake sale. “Not this again.”
“Is it so wrong that she wants to spend time with her father?”
“She’ll get hurt, Char. She doesn’t have the size or the strength.”
But that wasn’t true. Not at all. Allison wasn’t adrift, waiting for someone else to superimpose dreams on her. “She has more strength than her mother.”
He didn’t see it. Charlotte could tell by the way Nash returned to raising splinters and knocking back webs that her meaning trundled by him like a combine harvester on its last drops of gas. That, more than spun silk knotted in a barn corner, started Charlotte on an incendiary path. Alex and Freesia had seen to it that Charlotte’s definition of strength had changed, and she was bound and determined that her daughters would see it, too.
Charlotte scorched a line to the barn door. Nash’s “Where are you going?” brought her up short.
“Home. To check on Alex and the baby.”
“Why not? Might as well move in there while you’re at it.”
Nash had never been a man given to fits and starts of inspiration. Closest he’d come of late was to use a vegetable peeler in place of a lost screwdriver. But the idea that Charlotte should move back home, the closest to breaking free as she might ever get, if only to help Alex with baby Maddie and put some breathing space back into her marriage, was downright brilliant.
“I believe I will.”
No fanfare. No raised voice. Just like that. As if she were accepting another spoonful of sugar in her tea.
For Nash’s part, the shift was barely perceptible. He lowered his arms and blinked, overly much. His once-warm eyes tightened to a squint, like he was staring straight into a sunset instead of shadows in a darkened barn.
Mama had always held fast to the notion that a little missing someone makes a mountain out of the love. Charlotte just hoped her choice didn’t prove to be the sweetest lie of all.
2
Freesia
The house where Elias March raised his family—the daughters he claimed, rather than the one he sired on the Georgia coast, was nearly symmetrical. From the curvy asphalt street, its profile was squat and base, all gray tin rooflines and white brick. But the view from the creek and fields? From the tight angle where Freesia watched Charlotte overturn a garden recessed into a lush green hillside, Elias March looked like the richest son of a bitch in Devon, Mississippi.
Two floors. Two roof dormers. Two bay windows connected by three stately arches. The doors were native pine. Lamp sconces flickered straight out of nineteenth century New Orleans, and the porch looked more like a living room than a place to drop muddy boots.
By contrast, Freesia’s childhood porch had been a lightless slab where twilight had blurred the faces of strange men who came to take her mama down to the beach. She couldn’t say Camille Day had relations with all of them, but one of them had been Elias March, a white, married man from Mississippi who somehow thought walking into the frigid Atlantic Ocean was better than the life he lived back in Devon, Mississippi.
Night had just begun to roll over to day, its pink underbelly exposed and cool. Freesia handed Charlotte a mug of coffee, cream and two sugars. About so many things, her half sister was predictable: the singsong way she answered the phone at the bridal shop; the self-deprecating phrases she linked to her sincerest of speeches; the way she could praise and curse eve
rything from carbohydrates to the humidity, all at once, her curses like daisies sprouted in the cracks of life’s misfortunes. Freesia had never met a person so predisposed to positivity, which made finding Charlotte on the doorstep of the perfectly symmetrical home the previous midnight, suitcase in hand, not one singsong, flowery word of explanation on her lips, all the more troubling.
“I forgot to trim back the milkweed.” Charlotte put the steamy mug aside on the flagstone path and continued hacking away at the weedy growth.
“It’s January, Charlotte.”
“All the more reason to trim it back. Monarchs’ll come back north too soon and the next cold snap will do ’em in, for sure. We all have to be responsible stewards along their journey. I’m thinking about joining the migration efforts. Doing what I can. Course, Nash spends most of his day trying to rid the world of insects, not protect them. He thinks I’ve lost my mind.”
She wore a nightgown that had seen better days—faded, thin enough to filter coffee grounds and nearly as dingy, given the clumps of soil that covered the cartoon bunny print. Her body moved loose inside the garment—no underclothes, a thatch of skin exposed here and there, breasts heavy. This, from a woman who put on makeup and fixed her hair to talk to Jesus.
Freesia wrapped her duster sweater tighter around her and sat in the nearby Adirondack, sampling conversational starters in her head that didn’t sound heavy-handed or judgmental. She had less than zero things to say about butterflies, with the obvious exception—that Charlotte seemed to be beating her wings inside the jar of this town.
“Daddy used to bring us things from his business trips—a magnet or a thimble, sometimes just a fancy postcard, from the places he’d traveled. One year, I asked him for seeds. Butterflyweed. It blooms in orange clusters, like little reaching stars. I was convinced they were the best, would attract the most butterflies. I don’t know how he found them, traveling around with the carnival like he did.”
Her head shook gently, side to side, no…no…, long after she’d finished speaking. Freesia supposed the extra push was necessary to realign her memories with a lifetime of lies, everything Charlotte and Alex had believed about their father’s occupation, his wanderings. She resumed cutting—hacking, really. Dry stalks collapsed from their once-stalwart positions, an avalanche at her knees that threatened to bury her.
“Charlotte…”
A nudge. Not much more. Freesia hadn’t even known what she meant to say after the soft note, but it was a song they had established months ago. In the year since Stella Irene’s death had brought them together, Charlotte had grown closer to Alex through the baby and the shared experience of motherhood. And she had grown closer to Freesia in all other things, not wanting to put undue stress on Alex.
Charlotte stilled her feverish trimming and collected the pruning shears, setting them on the flagstone at a good distance. A safe distance. One pat of her fingertips atop their pink handle for reassurance. Again, with the head shake. No. No. “It’s just some time apart. That’s all.”
Nash.
Cold needled into Freesia’s lungs and made it hard for her to breathe. People like Charlotte needed connection, impenetrable and unbreakable bonds, to feed her spirit; people like Freesia would as soon wield those shears than to allow hurt inside.
“Time apart from what?” Alex’s voice reached them from the other side of the brick firepit.
The intrusion was a thunderclap, well-intentioned and divisive, all at once. Charlotte’s transformation was nearly instantaneous. Her rounded shoulders flattened. She began brushing the garden from her clothes and skin, and a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes slid into proper place.
“From that baby girl that has you up all night,” said Charlotte, too bright, too cheerful, too damn much of everything. “We were just saying that you can’t be a good mama if you don’t take care of yourself first.”
It was a performance all for Alex’s benefit, but Charlotte’s gaze drifted to Freesia in silent support. Freesia managed a tight smile, also for Alex’s benefit, then pulled a long, hot tug of black coffee from her mug. Freesia had even less to say about mothering than she did about butterflies.
“Why on earth are you out here dressed like that?” Alex’s voice was swaddled in exhaustion. She set the remote baby radio on the edge of the firepit and collapsed into an adjacent chair. “Why are you here at all?”
Alex had missed the quiet lift of the brass knocker against pine wood last night, Charlotte’s pink and swollen eyes, the insistence with which she refused her old room—the one Freesia had taken—in favor of the spare before sitting on the edge of the naked mattress, knees pressed together for long minutes. Alex had missed the shower that didn’t quite cover Charlotte’s cries, and she had missed the breakfast trail of black forest cake crumbs on the kitchen island. Through the long lens of a year spent preoccupied with impending motherhood, she had missed so much more.
“I want to help you more with the baby,” said Charlotte. “Hard to do that from across town.”
Alex squinted at the lifting sky. “Your left cheek does that spasm-smirk thing when you’re lying.”
Charlotte touched her cheek, left a smudge of dirt behind. “It ain’t a lie. Takes me a good six minutes if I get behind Earl Frizeal and his basset hound on his sidecar motorcycle.”
“It isn’t the entire truth, either.”
Charlotte pressed her lips into a frown and gathered up a breath. “I left Nash.”
“What?” Alex straightened, not entirely possible in an Adirondack, a little like a beetle caught on its back, and when it proved too awkward, she stood and paced. “Charlotte, no…”
Not no as in I’m sorry. No as in big mistake. Huge. Sold-off-the-fatted-cow-for-magic-beans kind of huge.
Freesia took a punishing hot sip to hold her tongue.
“Just for a little while,” said Charlotte. “Until cooler heads prevail.”
“You have to go home today and make this right. I’ll get Jonah to watch Maddie and help Freesia at the shop.” Alex worried over to Charlotte, untangling her from the knot she was on the ground and brushing at all the places brown soil clung to her.
Charlotte went round-eyed and slack-mouthed, her protests of “Whaaa?” and “Well, for heaven’s sake,” limp in the wake of a pushy older sister who believed she always knew best.
“You two love each other. You’ll work it out.”
Charlotte sent a do-something glance to Freesia.
Freesia was a corked bottle whose contents had been shook. She usually buttoned her lip in moments like this, nothing but a footnote to the decades-old dynamic Alex and Charlotte had scripted. That was the thing about scripts—they were ever-changing, fluid, expanding with the new or trimmed of the old and tired. Or at least, they should be.
“Sometimes love can’t fix what respect don’t cover. She’s had her first taste of freedom since I arrived.” Freesia’s stare was a challenge aimed at Alex. “I don’t see the rush.”
“This isn’t about freedom. This is about knowing my sister.” Not Charlotte. My sister. “She thrives on being needed, taking care of others.”
“Maybe it’s time they learn they’re capable of caring for themselves.” Freesia’s voice was as cool as the dawn, nothing like Alex’s tired hysterics. She couldn’t say the same for her nerves at full morning muster.
“Distance solves nothing. Time solves nothing. The heart doesn’t grow fonder with absence. It just grows holes and looks for other things to fill it. Dangerous, unhealthy things.”
“She isn’t you, Alex.”
Freesia’s brain cataloged how Alex had filled her holes, pre-Devon, pre-baby: alcohol, self-sabotaging behavior at work, the financial trappings of a privileged politician’s wife, vacant sexual encounters. Alex’s things would not be Charlotte’s things.
Stillness returned to the morning like a wet blanket of humidity on the skin. They formed a most unlikely triangle: Alex tugging at Charlotte’s arm and Freesia, opp
osite, so very much unlike the other, adding weight and darkness and tension where there was only ever light. Increasingly, Freesia wondered why she stayed here, with these women. But this, this seemed the likeliest of reasons. To lend herself and her voice to another, if only for a time. Even if it rewrote a script forever.
Alex dropped her grip.
Cries erupted from the baby monitor. The morning, the triangle, the moment, fractured.
Charlotte tried to crawl the conversation back. “We’re all just tired.”
“Some of us more than others,” Alex said, pointedly, aimed at Freesia.
Freesia didn’t know what to do with that. A pre-dawn garden with Charlotte so fragile wasn’t the time or place to unearth all the skeletons of meaning Alex’s words carried.
Alex disappeared, largely the way she had come—divisive, intrusive, a thunderclap of bare feet up the flagstone steps to the house. Freesia looked after her for a time, too long, trying to gather up something to say to Charlotte.
She picked up the pink-handled sheers and swiped her wrist at the dirt smudge on her cheek, 100 percent back to the Charlotte of old—hands on her hips, sassy as the day would be eternally long, still the strongest Delta drawl Freesia had ever heard.
“If I wanted ugliness, I could have just stayed home.”
3
Charlotte
For three days, Charlotte awoke to quiet. No noises rattling in the barn, no elephant-stomps of children down the hallway to the bathroom, no cocksure 5 a.m. greeting under her window from a free-ranging one-eyed rooster named Turkey—Gabe’s idea. For three days, Charlotte rattled around her childhood home, an alternate universe where she was neither wholly child nor adult, single nor married, content nor displeased, but a solid hash of it all—past and present and a preoccupation with the future tossed into the mix. As it turned out, Mama had been right. A steady diet of practical dalliances and self-indulgent turns of the clock could make the heart grow fonder.
The Butterfly Dream (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 2) Page 2
