The Butterfly Dream (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 2)

by Danielle Blair

  Freesia’s brain sifted his critique into two compartments: defensive and outrageous. Jon Yu’s critique of her bridal gowns evoked a phallic desert cactus. The new artist inside her folded, a scathing new low in couture commentary to be sure; the feminist inside, however, rallied on a laugh of absolute absurdity.

  Jon joined her in a snicker.

  The amusement ballooned to more laughter, a full-on release of pent-up stress and uncertainty and hope. Moisture misted her eyes. Freesia began collecting her sheets in a slow-motion recovery, turning them all the same direction to shove back into her portfolio.

  Jon placed a hand over hers. “Come design for me.”

  Freesia sobered. Her tide of indulgence receded. She was certain she’d heard him incorrectly. “What?”

  “Your scope is too narrow. Bridal gowns aren’t right for your message, but women’s fashion is… a dominant slice of the fashion cake. Your designs speak to the optimistic who believe they can change the world. Marketed alongside messages of activism—not the philanthropy of the rich and out of touch—you’ll be an authentic voice, a beacon of self-expression. Your own collection under my house and seed money.”

  “I… I don’t know what to say.”

  “The newest generation of women—the one that includes those nieces of yours—are enjoying the most freedom of choice in human history. Fewer are choosing marriage, and those who do walk down the aisle are dispensing with tradition in increasing numbers. Registries that benefit charity. Eco-friendly, biodegradable confetti. Humanitarian honeymoons. You could aim your creativity at those who have outdated views of love and that one special day in their lives—one—or your designs could speak to women all the other thirty-thousand days of their lives. Hell, even your name is a PR dream.”

  Freesia’s limbs screamed for movement, blood flow. She stood and walked the few steps to the building’s sheer face, nothing but floor to ceiling glass. Beyond the window, rain droplets crystalized to snow.

  “It’s a big decision,” said Jon. “Take some time. Of course, you’d need to relocate. I have a few properties I could set you up in, initially, until you found something on your own.”

  “New York?”

  “If you’re serious about designing clothes, Freesia, you can’t stay home in Mississippi.”

  Of all the things that bubbled to the surface of her riddled thoughts, one punched out harder than the rest. “Mississippi isn’t my home.”

  Home and Freesia had never been on the best of terms. She’d been conceived in Georgia, dragged along the coast during childhood, a gypsy of the world after that. But there were the girls in Gallery II and there was Charlotte, who believed she was a gift before Jon Yu confirmed her talent in his eccentric and confusing way, and the bridal shop and all the ambitions born inside it were the closest she’d ever come to the elusive home.

  “Then maybe New York should be,” said Jon.

  Freesia held out her hand for him to shake. He smiled, accepted it, accepted her inability to kiss-kiss on the cheek or find comfort in things going her way. “Thank you, Jon. No one has ever believed in me before.”

  A lie? She couldn’t decide. It felt like truth.

  “I’ll have my financial offer and specifics messengered to your hotel room first thing in the morning.”

  Jon hadn’t apologized, but he had done the next best thing—offered her a path to her dream. He helped her collect the sketch sheets and accompanied her back into the gallery.

  The new snow had thinned out fashion show attendees by more than half. Workers deconstructed the stage, the lighting, the props that cast a bald space into a Nordic-inspired landscape. An assemblage of well-dressed pouty young men pooled at the room’s periphery around a pair of fancy boots, blonde hair, and a magenta, flared dress.

  Allison.

  If someone had told Freesia that Charlotte’s youngest by thirteen minutes, a girl that gravitated to animals and hay bales and all manner of gritty pursuits, a girl who thought a trip to New York might possibly mark the apocalypse, would be the most dazzling attraction at an international fashion gathering with some of the most beautiful guys in the world, Freesia might have set loose the Silver Swarm to do a collective diagnoses based on urban legend and hearsay that they did so well. Delusional, their most likely consensus.

  Freesia raised her phone and snapped a photo for Charlotte. An occasion this rich with possibility deserved a beautifully shaped sarcastic text to accompany it. She glanced around the massive space but did not spot another pair of Milo Caprese boots.

  She parted the sea of pouty-faced, slightly feminine male models. Inside the throng of androgynous hotness, she felt ancient.

  “Where’s Natalie?” she asked Allison.

  Allison glanced around as if she was emerging from a coma of perfection and the real world just didn’t compare. “She was right over…” A wayward point. “…there. Talking to Oliver.”

  Over there turned out to be nowhere. A vast emptiness where white beyond the window blurred and joined the blank canvas event space.

  Something lurched in Freesia’s belly. She searched for a splash of burgundy and orange and yellow, the colors of fire so easily spotted in a bleak landscape. Easily, except when it wasn’t.

  Natalie was no longer in the room.

  Three texts went unanswered.

  Allison had gone back to flirting with a boy who looked like an animated fantasy—frost-white hair, Asian genes, brooding face.

  Freesia grabbed her wrist and tugged her closer. Allison’s frown at being pulled from the Abercrombie & Fitch tangle was exactly like her mother’s expression when Alex made an executive decision on the bridal shop without a three-way consensus.

  “Who’s Oliver?”

  “’Bout five-ten. Looks like a young Jude Law. Can’t miss him,” said Lachlan.

  “You’re coming with us.” Freesia captured Lachlan’s wrist, too.

  “What?” Allison affected the teenager mortification look. “Auntie Freeeee.”

  “It’s cool.” Lachlan rallied the beautiful troops, told them to split up, text him if they found her. “I have a few ideas.”

  His gaze made prolonged contact with Allison, eyes widened a flash, a telepathic look that seemed to say hoo-boy.

  Freesia’s heart stopped. Ideas to a nineteen-year-old included eating—or maybe not—did male models eat?—and sex, not necessarily in that order.

  17

  Charlotte

  Flossie Calloway had the most glorious thatch of cotton candy pink hair that Charlotte had ever seen. Whipped and teased and winged and pompadoured, quite possibly a wig, it was a visual dessert set atop a marshmallow complexion that had seen better days. She was a big woman with an even bigger voice that bellowed and trilled beyond her little slice of the back-carnival—an open shipping container with a gypsy curtain for a door. At sight of Groucho bringing her a visitor, she stopped her operatic-piratesque-ribald ditty.

  “I need her in twenty, just inside the entrance.”

  “Sure, boss,” said Flossie.

  Groucho left the way he had arrived, bellowing into his walkie-talkie.

  “Have a seat, sweetheart. We’ll do your makeup first.”

  Charlotte settled into a director’s chair in front of a fancy lighted mirror table.

  “What’dya have in mind?” asked Flossie.

  “Anything that’s not me. If only for a little while.”

  Flossie gave a grunting snicker of appreciation. “Sounds like the rest of us, doll.” She pulled Charlotte’s hair into a low bun, then dipped a sponge into a vat of white cream that smelled like stale florals and slathered it on Charlotte’s cheek. “Got a name?”

  “Charlotte.”

  “So tonight you’ll be…” Flossie mimed a flourishing, imaginary banner. “…Lottie,” then added, as an aside, “if only for a little while.”

  As a kid, Charlotte had disliked every nickname. Sarah Bucklew once called her Lottie in third grade. Lottie Dah. Somehow,
Flossie’s flair for the theater made the name appealing now.

  “How long have you worked at the carnival?”

  “This one? Eighteen years or so. Outfit outta Birmingham. Before that, family-run one out of Jersey. Thirty-two years in total.”

  “Wow,” said Charlotte, lamely. She couldn’t imagine thirty-two hours on the road, much less thirty-two years. The prospect seemed exhilarating. She thought of the monarch butterflies, how subsequent-generation females engaged in the longest migrations on the planet. “What made you decide to join all those years ago?”

  “I used to hold down a respectable job at a bank in Trenton. Then one day, a man walked in and pressed a tommy gun into my side. Said the only way to make him famous was for me to die.”

  Charlotte nearly turned inside out. “That’s awful. What happened?”

  “He wrote his demands out on the back of a deposit slip to his own account. As soon as the manager called him out by name for being stupid, he ran.”

  Flossie started in on Charlotte’s eyes. Heavy black lines, false lashes, enough glittery white gel on her lids and vining her cheekbones to qualify as a snow globe. Charlotte failed to recognize herself. She had never felt so glamourous.

  “After that, I never could get back to normal. Got the shakes real bad around new people, men especially. Didn’t feel safe anywhere. Then one day I met a ride jockey with a carnival group. Saw how everyone took care of each other, protected each other. Cold up north, though. Eventually made my way down here.”

  Alex once told Charlotte she could see their father. In coffee shops. Beside her on park benches. Once, in an elevator that got stuck. Charlotte couldn’t imagine that; she had to look at photographs, at her son’s face, to even remember what Daddy looked like. Part of that special connection he and Alex had once shared, Charlotte supposed.

  She wanted to ask Flossie about her father, about this world he had hid from them, but Flossie painted a bold circle at her mouth. The remainder of her lips recessed into the white paint of her face. She connected the vines to her lips to give the appearance they were growing from within her. Art of the highest caliber. At least, the closest to art that a small-town girl would ever be.

  “Time for costume, Lottie.”

  Charlotte followed her to wardrobe racks stuffed with sequined garments and bold slashes of color. “You pick something.”

  And so Flossie fitted Charlotte with a black wig, long and twisted into braids. To this, she added an intricately striped black-and-white hat, miraculously lightweight but heavy in optical illusion and frippery.

  “Is there much in the way of money? In this lifestyle?” asked Charlotte.

  “Thinking about joining?”

  “I was wondering if it would have been enough to support a family. Back, say, twenty years ago.”

  Flossie rummaged in the recesses of a standing wardrobe. Her voice traveled.

  “Not a bad living, if you think about it. Bunks travel with you. Most of the food is paid for by the company. You get to keep most of what you earn—well, what you don’t blow in the towns you visit. That’s where this life gets some people. Vices in the towns.”

  She produced an outfit that was clearly the matching companion to the hat, all futuristic saucers and geometric curls over a vaudevillian foundation. After asking Charlotte to strip down to her skivvies, Flossie zipped and tucked her into another skin, another person, another world, bold enough to push further.

  “Did you ever know a man named Elias March?”

  Flossie paused, gave it a good thought. “Can’t say as I did. Memory’s not what it was. Friend of yours?”

  “He was my father,” said Charlotte. “He told our family he was a traveling salesman who sold electric steel. Turns out he worked the carnivals.”

  Flossie gave her a sad smile, at odds to her whimsical hair. “This lifestyle ain’t for everyone. But for some, like me, it’s a salvation. Same with your dad, I reckon.”

  She turned Charlotte toward a full-length mirror and clicked a switch on a box sewn into the lining. Charlotte’s high collar and seams lit with rows of hundreds of pearl lights. The effect on her face glitter was nothing short of magical.

  “What do you think?”

  “Definitely not a farmer’s wife.”

  Flossie’s cheeks rounded to accommodate a smile. “Good.”

  Charlotte met her gaze in the reflection. “What do I do?”

  “You’ll know when the time comes.”

  Charlotte couldn’t be certain they were talking about performance art.

  At the curtain, drawn back for Charlotte to go, Flossie called her once more. “Lottie?”

  Charlotte surprised herself when she answered. “Yes?”

  “Don’t be too hard on your old man,” said Flossie. “We all need time to be someone else, if only for a little while.”

  Charlotte’s hour as Lottie passed in a blur. Her most captive audiences were children, delighted by the costume’s visuals and lights. Neighbors and friends oblivious to her identity stopped to interact with her in silence, take photographs, and watch her antics. Out of necessity, to be seen as a performer past the outlandish outfit, her movements had to be exaggerated, her steps bold. The first moments in her second skin, she had been stilted, unsure, the experience wholly for Nash. By the final moments, Charlotte was moving for herself.

  Nash had settled at a distance, a sack of popcorn in his hands. At times when the crowd thinned, Charlotte set out to make him laugh: following carnival-goers only to stop as a statue when they turned around; corralling a group of children to sit beside an adult then sprinting away at her signal; coaxing strangers to hold either end of a roll of fair tickets around the corner of a tent to see how long they’d stand there. Charlotte couldn’t resist aiming some of her attention squarely on Nash. Twice that hour, she disproved her theory that he never blushed.

  After Charlotte changed and washed her face, they collected a ticket roll as payment and ate hot dogs on their stroll to the Ferris wheel. Not once did they talk about the farm, children, bills, family, chores. Charlotte told him about Flossie, her alter-ego, Lottie, and the things she heard people say while she was in costume. Nash told her about the conversation he had with Groucho near the end of Charlotte’s hour.

  “Said he’d take you with him when they roll out tonight,” Nash said.

  “He did not.”

  “‘Quality material’, I think were the words he used. Then he said they were a little short on bunk space and you’d have to spoon up to him most nights. He’d let you hold his walkie-talkie.”

  Charlotte giggled, lighter than she’d felt in a long time.

  At the Ferris wheel, they loaded into a car. Nash held back to talk to the operator—ride jockey, Flossie had called them. Bar secured, the car swung backward to load the next group of passengers.

  “What was that about?” asked Charlotte.

  Nash shrugged, changed the subject. “How many hours we have left to use these?” He pulled back the flap of his jacket like a street con selling stolen cell phones. The roll of tickets had to be in the upper hundreds.

  Charlotte didn’t want to pull out her phone to check the time. “Not enough.”

  Nash squinted up at the trees, the sky. “Windy night.”

  She knew that nonchalant voice, the one that underscored nearly every single brilliant idea he’d had as a kid, that long-forgotten subtle way he’d suggest something like it wouldn’t get them in trouble but always did. Charlotte purred out a warning.

  “Naaash…”

  “No reason we can’t share.”

  They started with the bucket of kids behind and below them. Nash waited for the operator to be busy loading the next car and he’d drop massive spirals of tickets into their waiting hands. When the wheel was loaded with fresh passengers and the ride began sweeping rotations in earnest, Nash and Charlotte took turns at the top crest releasing smaller, wind-born lengths over the fairgrounds. They laughed until her stomach issued
her a painful ultimatum—chuckle or digest, not both. The stiff breeze wicked away tears that had sprouted in her eyes. For the first time in days, months, she didn’t need anywhere but here to feel content.

  The operator evacuated the ride in puzzling order. Nash dropped more tickets to the greedy kids below before they shouted out “Thanks, mister!” and bolted up the midway. Nash and Charlotte rotated to the top.

  A breeze kicked up. Charlotte shivered. Nash shrugged out of his coat, laid it across them like a blanket and put his arm around her. She snuggled up to his side, breathed in the scent of him. Noise from the games and rides crept away. All that remained was their stillness versus the motion of their bodies against gravity, against the wind. Charlotte closed her eyes.

  Time passed. How long, she couldn’t say. She blinked back into awareness, the stars still their canopy.

  “I think we’re stuck.” Charlotte wriggled out from beneath the warmth of his coat to look over the sides and front. No other passengers. No one, period.

  The car tipped forward. Her stomach somersaulted.

  Nash tugged her back to him. The bucket stabilized on a robust rock. “We’re not stuck. I paid the guy to put out the maintenance sign for an hour.”

  Charlotte’s first thought: good thing I don’t have to pee.

  Charlotte’s second thought: that’s just about the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.

  Her heart skedaddled back to the place it had been, in his arms, under his jacket, swinging happily.

  “Thought you gave the kid all your money.”

  “I said that to get you in a costume.”

  She tickled him where his ribs met lean muscle, ground zero for making him squirm. He barked out a laugh. Their movement got the car to shaking again. When his breaths evened, he said, “Few weeks ago, I don’t think I was the kind of husband that encouraged that. Hell, I’m not so sure I’d even be here. Always so much to be done. Then Jonah got ahold of me. Came to see me the day after I rearranged that guy’s nose at the pool hall.”