Nash’s boots clomped closer. “What’s that?”
Charlotte’s eyes scanned the grid below the logo, handwritten food items and amounts, the total at the bottom. “Looks like some kind of inventory or order form.”
He took a peek over her shoulder. “Your family have ties there?”
“Hardly even ate there.”
“The year it opened.”
“How do you remember that?”
“The summer my mom got so sick. Dad brought chicken home from there when he got tired of cooking. Lines were always clear out the door.” Nash squirmed, his grasp headed straight for the muscle that joined his neck and shoulders, where he carried his tension most days. He had caught himself in the memory, tangled up inside too many words, a place he was never comfortable. Mama Strickland had a bout with ovarian cancer at a time when survival rates were almost unheard of. Her perseverance contributed to Nash’s unwavering belief in miracles where love was involved.
“Why would it be in our trailer? In the oven? With this?” Charlotte fetched the tie and studied it. Navy blue with white and peach-colored blooms, blurred like a Van Gogh. Despite Mama always trying to convince him otherwise, Daddy abhorred wearing flowers.
Charlotte dropped the necktie at her feet. She felt sick.
“It means nothing,” said Nash.
“This isn’t exactly a customer receipt.”
“Maybe an employee or a delivery driver brought his girl here.”
“I hardly think Big Auntie’s Chicken and Waffles and Soul Eatery would require a tie of either.”
Nash paced. Not an easy feat in an eight-by-two-feet space.
“I’m trying here, Char. The two could be totally unrelated. Years apart.” His voice was booming, bigger than the trailer, the way he got when he accused her of not listening to reason. “Your mother loved you. What happened or didn’t happen here will never change that. They had their reasons for keeping this part of their lives private. You should both respect that. Are you going to tell the kids about Steven? About how a butterfly chaser almost ruined our marriage?”
He said ‘butterfly chaser’ as if Steven had been a purse thief in a clown costume.
“It wasn’t all him.”
Nash’s lips pressed to a line. She’d heard a mad bull breathe softer from his nose. “Don’t split hairs, Char.”
Charlotte shrugged. “Maybe someday I will tell them.”
“What about the days after my cousin’s death when you caught me swallowing pills and you wailed on me until I spit them out? Or all those midnights you snuck a basket into the neighbor’s garden and stole what we needed to survive because we were so goddamned hungry but we were too proud to go on food stamps? Will you tell them about those days too?”
Her cheeks flamed. Glands at her jaw cinched, near to pain. They’d been so young. Tried too hard to prove to their parents they could make it, that getting married hadn’t been a mistake. Not a Sunday passed by when Charlotte wasn’t still figuring a way to atone with their neighbors, keep an eye out to helping those who took more to eat at the potluck suppers.
Nash frowned, stopped his wrangling and fussing. Eyes rounded, he took her in, then stared a new hole in the floor. His tone retreated.
“There are things between us that Gabe and Natalie and Allison will never know because the details don’t change the outcome. No different with your folks.”
“But the shop…the perfect marriage. What if it was all a lie?”
“Perfect will always be a lie, Char. That doesn’t mean love isn’t worth it.” He extended his hand for her to take. His head nodded toward the fields. “Let’s get outta here.”
Charlotte accepted his offer.
Fingers interlocked, he led her away from this new reality, the sickness of new possibilities unraveling the childhood memories that had stitched the March family together in her heart, everything that had remained after the grief of death came through like a seam ripper, twice. Nash led her down the steps and out into the evening.
She hid the paper in her pocket.
7
Freesia
But for one decision.
But for one well-meaning pep talk by a man who knew nothing of her life. But for Charlotte, talking of signs and how Mississippi wasn’t yet done with all it had to offer. But for her answering the call of a backwoods lawyer and getting tangled in a family not hers, Freesia would not be in a roadside motel bathroom in Enterprise, Alabama, looking out the window and watching a man masturbate over a laundry line of tied-up women’s underthings in the alley.
She yanked the cord on the mini-blinds, cutting off the scene. Her gaze drifted to the mirror. In the Manhattan apartment John Yu had secured for her, her reflection would have been groomed, dressed in something of her own creation that complimented her double latte skin, her straightened hair swept into an updo, a droplet of something shiny hanging from her earlobes. She might have practiced her New York smile, nothing too committed, a little mystery about her, enough to keep others guessing at how such a self-made woman who once stitched clothes from banana leaves came into such favor.
But the image that stared back wasn’t that woman.
She closed her eyes. Free, you’re gone.
Beyond the door, her mother blasted Coltrane through that damned radio. The time apart had done a number on the old woman’s hearing. Freesia never would have tolerated that, no matter how genius the sound.
She wasn’t entirely sure what she intended when they left the island under a darkened sky. Camille hadn’t wanted to stop, hadn’t wanted to go, so she’d resorted to silence, which had been fine with Freesia until it came to important decisions about meals and medication and rest. Her mother hadn’t slept a wink in the car, just stared out at the empty night. Occasionally, she uttered to herself, opinions about driving. Rich, considering she had failed to do the same when Freesia had asked her for help to get her license at sixteen.
“What’re you gonna do, child? Leave?” Camille had said.
Five hours into the drive to Devon, around the same time she had tossed a few more words about the appalling lack of suitors in Freesia’s life and asked her if she was a lesbian—“Be okay if you were, I s’pose. You always did think you were better than men”—Freesia thought it best to find a room.
She didn’t want to kill the woman before she died.
Freesia showered and pulled on a tank top and flimsy pants. She spotted her mother’s pills where she had dispensed them beneath the room lamp. Camille’s gaze followed Freesia’s progress from the bathroom to the radio.
Click.
Her ears buzzed in the sudden nothingness.
“You didn’t take your medication.” At one in the morning, her tone was all judgment. “You need sleep.”
“I need to go back.”
“To what, Mama? The life you were doing such a bang-up job of holding together?”
“That’s where he knew to find me.”
“He? Who’s he? Another of those quality boyfriends too cheap to buy a punching bag, who takes you for everything?”
Her mother gave a withering stare.
Freesia poured bottled water into a Styrofoam cup and handed her mother the pills. “Take these or I’ll invite the nice man in the alley to share your bed tonight.”
Ten seconds ticked by, the two of them at a standoff. Freesia raised her brow, no words needed.
Watch me.
Camille swallowed her pills. A sneeze would amount to more than the woman drank.
Freesia sat on the second of two double beds. She pulled the photo from her pocket.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Elias and Stella Irene from before?”
Her mother swatted the air as if the question was a lazy fly, then set her hands to tugging down the polyester coverlet, the turd-colored blanket, the tucked sheets. She didn’t move efficiently, struggling to stand enough to move the coverings down the mattress. Freesia fisted her hands and galvanized her weight and res
isted the pull to help her. The only leverage Freesia had to get to the truth was her able-bodied capacity to attend to Camille’s needs. They might as well establish that, here and now.
“The past is the past,” Camille said when she’d peeled open the bedding.
“Surely that’s not what you told yourself when Elias March showed up in your world again.”
“I’m tired.” She leaned on her elbow, tried to get her feet under the blanket, failed.
“Did he tell you he was coming, Mama?”
“So tired.” Her voice thinned against the pillow.
“Did he call you from his kitchen before he left?”
“Get the light.”
“From a phone booth on the road?”
“Please…”
Such an odd thing from her mother’s mouth.
“How did you know to watch the ocean, Mama?”
Camille closed her eyes, her face ugly with something—grief, pain, something.
“Did you invite him into your bed?”
“Enough, child,” she said, her tone brittle, savage. Her hand covered her mouth. Eyes widened. An odd gurgle trapped in her throat.
She was going to throw up.
Freesia scrambled for a trash can, made it back in time.
Pills, not much more, emptied into the waste bin.
This might well be the end.
Her mother was dying and Freesia’s anger was expediting the process. Camille Day departing before coughing up answers would do none of them any good. Freesia fetched a damp washcloth, more water, some semblance of sympathy, but she returned to find the woman asleep.
She brushed back a curl, fallen across her mother’s forehead. The hair was tarnished gray, matted, nasty. Freesia’s chest compressed, shouldering the ninety-two-pound albatross of neglect until she remembered, she had said as much: I can’t live like this, Mama. I’m gonna stay with friends until my first travel assignment comes in. Take the job with Estelle’s sister. Break free of this place. Time to do for yourself.
Then there had been Freesia’s bonuses from the international agency, postmarked to St. Simon’s Island, for hardship locales, extra weeks, last-minute assignments, a willingness to go anywhere, do anything so long as it didn’t involve going back to a beach shack in Georgia.
On those reassurances, her chest found room to stretch again.
She curled into a ball on her own bed, light on, to watch her mother’s shoulder for the rise and fall. Once, when the movement took too long, Freesia’s pulse splintered. She raised her head, frozen to her own exhales and inhales, until she was sure Camille Day still drew breath.
Such an odd thing, given Freesia’s anger, the inevitability of it all. But for the woman across from her, Freesia would not be.
Her vision treaded against the pillow as a thought entered her mind.
“Who’s he?” she whispered. “Who needs to find you?”
It wasn’t so much that her sewing room inside the March house had been repurposed. Freesia reminded herself that days earlier, she had been off to start a life in New York. When she’d said her goodbye to the special retreat inside this hornet’s nest of emotion, it had been cluttered with boxes and nude dress forms and empty hangars. And it wasn’t so much that Charlotte and Alex had acknowledged her decision, the one that had changed her trajectory to boomerang back home again, sick mother in tow, by figuring on the space as the safest and most comfortable place for a woman to spend her final days. None of those things made Freesia want to take up Charlotte’s practice of running into the fields.
What had Freesia turned inside out was what occupied the space now: a bed that looked nothing like a hospice bed but still had hidden machinations beneath; freshly laid hardwood floors to replace the dingy old carpet that used to eat Freesia’s dropped beads; refinished French doors out to the back porch that no longer stuck inside the jam; a smooth leather recliner positioned at an angle to the bed with a chunky knit throw; a rolling bed table; every light on a dimmer switch; beach art on the walls and tables; all of it dressed under layers of opulent, summery linens.
“What is all this?” She looked at Charlotte. “Jonah?”
Charlotte shook her head.
When an answer wasn’t forthcoming, Freesia prompted her by name.
Charlotte clasped her hands like she was praying or coming at the tree on Christmas morning. Her smile, her bubbly evasiveness, hit Freesia in the gut like a barbell of expectations.
“There’s something here for you.” Charlotte swiped an envelope off the table and handed it to her. “Best just read it.”
Beneath the fancy penmanship of Freesia’s name, a line like a wave.
She glanced at her mother, settling in on the bed, her expression the brightest Freesia had seen it in six hundred miles. The warm sensation that followed brought her closer to the daughter who had checked on her throughout the night than the daughter who had wanted to push her out of the moving vehicle for saying, “If you loved me, you’d give me a say in dying.”
Inside the envelope, a handwritten letter on heavy, water-marked paper.
Freesia,
You’ve given new life to my days. I want to thank you by giving your mother a pleasant end to hers. A top-notch hospice team is waiting to hear from you when you get back.
Keeping it real,
Jay
P.S. Any chance the ring was found? It belonged to my grandmother.
Freesia’s emotions were a reluctant crawl, a measured fitting to see which felt right. The part of her she’d left out on the road that rainy day appreciated the gesture, the throwback to sentiments they alone had shared. The part of her since—the scene at the shop, in the alley, all of him in his grand, unreachable privilege, believing them to have commonalities, even expressing the desire for it to be so—sat inside her like a generous tumor. Something she never asked for. Unwelcome. Ultimately, something to be shed.
Freesia—and Camille—would not be anyone’s charity.
“Send it back.”
“What?” Charlotte’s mood cycled backward, from Christmas to Halloween.
“All of it. Send it back.” Freesia tried to cram the letter back in its envelope, failed. She left it a crumbled mess on the table. “She can sleep on the couch until we can move a bed from another room.”
Charlotte’s mouth was a stretched O.
“How did he know?”
At Freesia’s sharp tone, Charlotte’s O flattened, pressed into a frown. “He came by the shop the next day with a huge bouquet, to apologize for the ruckus, and asked if you’d made it safely to New York.”
Camille grinned like a weathered old sea bird with a belly full of fish. “Guess she’s not a lesbian after all.”
Charlotte twisted around, got a good look behind her as if she had stepped in something deep. Few things steered Charlotte off her conversational game. Apparently, Camille Day was one of them.
Freesia said, “Charlotte, you had no right.”
“I didn’t know it was a state secret,” said Charlotte. “You would have run into him eventually.”
“Right. Because I’ve lived in Devon for over a year and I’ve run into him exactly once.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” said Camille. “Way you drive.”
Her mother’s digs were like spilled beads. Stick around long enough, there’d be enough to stitch a red-carpet gown. Freesia shot Charlotte her best I-told-you-so look.
“He asked if helping out with care would be appropriate. I told him proper sometimes holds people back from kindness. Guess he took that to mean yes.”
Charlotte’s gaze diverted around the room like guilt had bubbled up inside and she was searching out a place to offload her burden. She slipped into her warmest smile and approached Camille, hand extended. “We haven’t met. I’m Charlotte.”
Camille placed her hand in Charlotte’s. “Pretty name.”
That was it. No word to Charlotte’s identity, that she was Stella Irene and Elias’s child,
a child Elias had abandoned to drive to Georgia. No word to how difficult it must be to open her childhood home to her father’s mistress. No word of gratitude.
“Your daughter’s name is inspired.” Charlotte sat beside Camille on the bed, still holding her hand. “To be a flower and a state of being all at once is mighty special. How did you come up with something so unique?”
“Freesias are perennials. Come back every year,” said Camille. “Guess I got that wrong.”
More beads.
Charlotte shot Freesia her best you-told-me-so look. She patted the old woman’s hand and slipped free.
“Did you find the ring?” asked Freesia.
“Alex put it in the bank’s safe.”
Freesia pulled out her phone to dial Alex.
“Water would be nice,” said Camille.
Charlotte popped up to pour a glass from the bedside carafe.
“Stop, Charlotte. She’s still well enough.” Freesia closed in on her mother and leveled her voice so there would be little wiggle room to mistake her message. “These women—Elias’s daughters—will not wait on you. You’ve already taken enough from them. You’ll be grateful, and you’ll do until you can’t.”
Camille steeled her gaze and raised her chin, as much an act of defiance as she could manage.
Charlotte poured water into the glass anyway then left the room. Her own brand of rebellion wrapped up in kindness. She was hell-bent on channeling Stella Irene, making all that was so wrong here right. But Charlotte didn’t know Camille’s brand of hurt, a special kind of witchcraft capable of separating the heart from the body and intent from truth. Freesia vowed she would strap her mother into the passenger seat and speed her back to the beach shack before she would allow her rogue wave to crash the shores and destroy what Alex and Charlotte and Freesia had built.
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 7
