Freesia helped her mother prop pillows, shifted her to her side so the rasp gathering at the back of Camille’s throat would subside, resettled the pieced quilt that Charlotte insisted had never draped Stella Irene and Elias’s bed. The frame and mattresses had been a hard enough mental hurdle after what Alex had said in the field. What had become their nightly ritual served to ease Freesia’s pulse this night. In a room where death introduced itself anew each day—different pain, different losses, different ways to grab hold and not let go—Freesia had no choice but to sit for a while and become acquainted.
Camille’s first sip of tepid tea dribbled past her tense lips. Freesia scanned their surroundings for something to dry her and spotted a stack of tea towels Charlotte had placed by the bed. She reached for one, placed it beneath her mother’s chin, then held the cup by its bowl, close by necessity and tipped it into her mother’s waiting mouth.
“I spoke to your doctor. Why did you tell me you had treatment, when he said you refused every bit of it?”
“What does he know?”
Freesia inhaled fully. Days ago, she had decided those first five seconds of response time to Camille’s abrasiveness was the most volatile, most reactionary, most pained. An inhale kept her blood pressure even. Beneath a blanket of fresh linens and bathed and powdered skin, Freesia’s nose still detected the essence of sickness.
“More than you.”
“He wanted to open me up. Ain’t natural.”
“Would have bought you more time. Us, more time.”
Another sip. Over the top of the cup, energy her mother didn’t have twisted her expression sour. “Plenty’a time for dying.”
The cup’s base rattled the saucer. Freesia set it on the nightstand, dove her attention into the blanket’s orderly pattern of reds and pinks and creams because the colors soothed and nothing about her life, of late, was anything but closely-guarded chaos.
“The lies,” Freesia said at last. “I can’t do it anymore, Mama. For whatever time we have left, no more lies.”
“Then no more about the past.” In the absence of tea service, Camille’s eyes drifted closed. She added a mumble. “Brings hurts.”
“Those hurts? They’re lessons. An endless string of them that I never seem to get right.”
“You seem right. Here, with these people.”
Freesia studied her mother’s features. They were closed off, all but the seam of her lips, snagged open to allow harsh sounds to escape. Sleep was winning.
“It’s a mask. Same as you,” said Freesia.
Camille’s eyes rolled behind her lids. “Then the lies are not just mine.”
Her mother was weak; the same way Freesia had felt all those years, forced to listen, absorb, mind, when all she wanted to do was run away. Freesia thought sleep best. She could tolerate her this way, only this way, weak; and for that, she hated herself.
“Why couldn’t we ever get along? Was I so wrong? Such a regret that you wanted no part?”
“Regret for me, not for you.” Camille’s voice was liquid, faint. “You weren’t a reminder of mistakes. You were a reminder that I could do better. You…were…my better.”
She half-opened her eyes.
The pain will be unlike any other. She may slip into delirium.
Freesia looked away. “Better than what, Mama? What mistakes? Loving Elias?”
“Love is never a mistake.” Her sigh ended on something close to a moan, the pain pill not yet flooding her veins. “Ain’t no matter.”
“It matters to me. I need to know him. From you, not from his family.”
“I’m tired, child. Let me sleep.”
This time, the sigh was Freesia’s. She stood and reached for the tea towel she had draped at the lacy neckline of her mother’s nightgown.
Camille grabbed her arm, squeezed it.
Freesia’s throat constricted.
“Those twelve days…were my lifetime. You want truth, child? I was baptized, day I pulled Eli from the waves, and I took my last breath, day he left.”
Freesia’s breath caught. Since the old photo of the three of them—Elias posed between Stella Irene and Camille—since the letter in the trailer, she had believed the narrative about plans, imagined Elias calling Camille from a phone booth in a roadside diner to tell him he was coming, pictured him showing up at the beach shack or Biscayne’s with her mother’s favorite flower—white freesias. To reach the ocean and kept going, in a place where she’d witness him dive beneath the surface and not come back…oh, God, what a number love had played on him. The same number it played on Camille. For her, death meant seeing him again.
“All else was waiting…like he asked…”
Freesia frowned. “He told you he’d be back for you?”
Her body surrendered. Sleep won.
“That he’d be back for us?”
Freesia slumped in the chair. How would she ever know the truth for all the lies? Did it even matter? Elias March had made his choice, all those years ago, and it wasn’t her. No amount of scaring up the past would change the present.
But Freesia knew that was the greatest lie of all.
The past had played its number. Her best hope was a future where she could find better. Better than being an outsider to a family too polite to tell her they wished she had remained a secret. Better than a man who repaired bikes because he couldn’t repair expectations that had taken him off the road toward his own dreams, who had the ability to make her fall in love with him, then steal her final breath the day he left. Her mother would forever be a reminder that Freesia could do better.
As soon as her mother went, so, too, would Freesia.
Jonah and his young daughter, Ibby, were at the house. Inexplicably, because he owed Freesia nothing. Possibly, because he felt responsible for influencing the current situation and because he knew that focusing on someone’s best, in order to be untouched by their worst, had its limitations. Understandably, because he’d watched his wife die of cancer and wished it upon no one. He said they would call her if she was needed at home.
“Go,” he whispered. “Go.”
Freesia climbed atop the orange bike. Movement through her extremities—toes dipping against the pedals, fingertips stretching for brake handles, lungs expanding past shallowness—awakened her to the night air. Her tires carved a meandering path. She had only meant to clear her mind through streets and gravel, but twice, without thought, she found herself before Hiram’s building. She braked and reread the sign.
If Hiram Can’t Fix It, We’re All Screwed!
Indeed.
At the back staircase, she climbed off the bike and set the kickstand. On the steps, she catalogued the moon, the stars, the town lights that formed a constellation in a galaxy not hers. Inside, she unboxed a lamp and set up a small nucleus of workspace, not even a quarter of the room’s square footage, mostly to impose order, never an intent beyond. Atop a table, in the shadows, she found a record player.
Same one from downstairs, cozied right up beside a wooden crate filled with offerings. She flipped through the albums— Temptations, Miracles, Green, Jarreau, Charles—and wondered after the specificity of the collection. What does a man with Jay’s resources say or do to make something like this happen?
Coco Chanel learned to sew in an orphanage. Armani was a window dresser.
You, Free? You found something above a repair shop.
God, almighty, she wanted it to be true. Had her best shot passed her by? Was her dream of making it big in New York already over before it had really begun?
With a nudge from Aretha on the record player, she picked up her sketch pad and pencil. Unapologetic. Mindful. Cathartic. She no longer chased her most important dress to date, the one she believed to be inside her, the one worthy of a Costume Institute exhibit at the Met in New York or a perfectly ordinary woman captured in a happenstance photograph doing something extraordinary.
Freesia sketched her own three-octave, stripped-down brand of pain and s
prinkled it with rain.
14
Alex
Breezes and Mississippi were not acquainted.
Once summer began in earnest, the air turned to a thick, tepid soup where the only hope of relief against the skin was a clutch of papers fanned at just the right angle. It was midmorning, Maddie’s first snooze of the day after rising at five, and already Alex was using the bridal shop’s projection spreadsheets as wind.
From the weathered picnic table Jonah had yet to haul away, she glanced up from the first significant profit calculations Match Made in Devon had seen in years, decades even, and caught another fetching sight: an eyeful of Jonah in filthy jeans, a tool belt, and a shrink-wrapped t-shirt with Rorschach patterns of perspiration. She tilted her head, chewed on her pencil, tried to remember how to add.
He glanced up at her and smiled around a two-inch driving nail cinched between his lips. Had Ibby not been inside watching morning cartoons, Alex would have abandoned her to-do list altogether, padded over to him, and made a request for him to drive something else.
She squirmed against the bench seat.
Alex no longer recognized Jonah’s backyard. Between the curved hedges that lined the property of the bungalow where he had grown up, Jonah was nearing completion on the most exquisite deck Alex had ever seen. The old roofline and insect-ravaged columns had been replaced with an open plan that wrapped the sides of the house in distinct living areas of harlequin-patterned cedar—an eating area, a mini-kitchen and bar, built-in benches with storage hatches. Instead of a rusty porch swing, a container garden wall joined a pergola to guide the wisteria that had vined close to the house for as long as Alex could remember. Instead of two old rocking chairs, a hexagonal feature with a separate conical roof. And at the far edge where grass met the mini-forest of sweet bay magnolias and red dragon maples, Jonah had preserved their special scarlet oak—the one they had dared each other to climb at aged twelve and took a carving knife to at sixteen—by crafting the deck around the trunk and leaving an adjacent hole to accommodate a hot tub.
“Lights,” he said the day he had laid out the plans. “Bulbs strung between the branches like it’s Christmas, all the time.”
Six months ago, she had wanted to ask him why. Why so much living space? Why the firepit and the up-lighting and the extra coat of stain? Why, in this house he had once left behind, small and ordinary by most standards, was he trying so hard? But he had been excited, had just received his special-order railing, and the question had died on her lips. Christmas, all the time. How he viewed their coming life together. Like they were twelve again and all that was required for happiness was to help each other with footholds, then have a sit and look around above the tree canopy.
Now, he was within a week of finishing. Even suggested a gathering of family and friends. He called it an engagement party. She called it another foothold.
“Heard you went to see Clement Grant about a prenup,” said Jonah.
It had taken less than forty-eight hours for that gossip nugget to circle back. Slow, by Devon standards. “Did you?”
He gave her a side glance. His response took a backseat to another nail hammered in place. “’Fraid I’ll get ahold of your daddy’s Ford in the divorce?”
Jonah’s humor felt as balmy as the day. She played along.
“Always did have your eye on it.”
“He took me to task over the engine, night I told him I wanted to marry you. Seems full circle to me.”
Alex remembered that night. She had waited by the light of the fridge dispenser when Daddy came in from the garage, well past midnight. All he’d said? Just because you want him doesn’t mean he deserves to have you.
“I’d already had all the legal documents related to the shop drawn up,” Alex said. “I needed an excuse to get in to see the Great and Powerful Esquire. Ask him about the trailer.”
“So you didn’t talk marriage?”
She unfolded herself from the picnic table and sat near him, at an arm’s reach so he had room to work. “He proposed, but I can’t compete for his affection with Taffy’s brisket.”
Jonah’s mouth stiffened somewhere between a pucker and a frown. He hammered five nails in succession, each with more gusto than the one before.
Her mood pulled back. “You always laugh at my awful and slightly distasteful jokes.”
Two more nails.
“Hey, everything okay?”
He drove the next nail with enough force to reach the Far East then sat back on his haunches and dropped the hammer, too hard, too loud.
She startled.
“What are we doing here, Alex?”
“What do you mean?”
“You picked a date, but according to your sister, you have yet to try on a dress—which is completely understandable, given that you’re surrounded by wedding dresses all day—and you haven’t touched that wedding list in your journal. Literally, the only page not doodled and marked to death. You say you want to plan everything but you’ve planned nothing. If I hadn’t gone and talked to Pastor Clay, we wouldn’t even have an officiant. Why—why are you putting this…past history ahead of our future?”
“Because Charlotte can’t move on.”
“Don’t.” He stood, paced. “Don’t put this on Charlotte. I know you. I’ve known you almost your whole life. This is what you do. You hide behind your lists and shuffle things in front of you to keep from dealing with things that make you uncomfortable.”
Alex glanced at the house, thought she heard Maddie crying. She strained, in the gap of silence, to hear it again but nothing came. Nothing but Jonah’s voice, surly, clipped.
“What happened—or didn’t happen—in that trailer all those years ago and our wedding in six weeks are totally unrelated.”
He perched on the picnic table bench where she’d been. They had swapped places—she, kneeling at the altar of a tree from simpler days, and he, the rational, numbered, adding-it-all-up one.
“Until that January day,” Alex said, “when Freesia walked into the lawyer’s office, a small piece of me rationalized what I saw all those years ago—that the woman I saw through that pipe was someone else, that I had somehow fallen asleep in the grass and woke up to see Mama emerging from a smoke break, that it was dusk and the light played tricks through the pines. And now that piece is disappearing, that part of me that believed it was all a misunderstanding and that perfect marriages do exist, that everything I believed to be true about the love my parents had for each other wasn’t a lie, that weddings aren’t just the opening act in making one another miserable for a lifetime. That marriage isn’t a lie.”
She reached for a cluster of nails, aligned them while she pushed aside her discomfort in favor of honesty.
“You were a success, Jonah. What you and Katherine had was rare. I can’t compete with perfect. I’ve already failed once, and I love you too much to fail again.”
He didn’t respond. For long moments, she stared at the burgundy leaves of the red dragons. In Autumn, when the present would become the past, the tree’s lacy leaves would be vibrant and loud and fiery. For now, they were like arteries, pumping blood, dormant in a muted life.
Jonah lowered himself beside her. She hadn’t heard him move, but he was there.
“After Katherine went into remission the first time, she became preoccupied with money. Hard to get back when you no longer have it, but Isabel was a little older than Maddie is now, and I had neglected my business so long to take care of things. I stopped paying attention.”
He rubbed at a patch of grime on his jeans, soon a repetitive stroke of his thumb simply to get through what he wanted to say.
“She started making questionable arrangements, high-risk loans that came due. Long story short, Katherine came to believe the only way to dig ourselves out was to make an insurance claim against the business.”
Alex backtracked Jonah’s timeline. Ibby being young would have been at the time of the …oh, no. The fire and ensuing arson inves
tigation had made the front page of Devon Daily for weeks. Her mother had mailed her every one of them.
“Nash tipped me off. Said he was driving by, saw her there right before the call came into the volunteer fire department. He put her in his truck and drove off, matchbox still shaking in her hand. By the time I got there, there was nothing left.”
Alex pushed her breath away, stayed in disbelief for as long as she could. Katherine was Jonah’s arsonist.
“Marriage isn’t a scorecard, Alex. And it’s never perfect. There was plenty of blame to go around with Katherine and me. If I’m honest, a part of me still loved you, still dared to hope for this, when I married her. But it is a choice. Every day. I will fail and you will fail and we will make it right, together, so long as we put each other first. It’s what Katherine and I did, what your parents did, what we’ll do. But the past? You can’t keep pushing it in front of us.”
Tears stirred. She swallowed them, found that a deep breath kept her holding a small sliver of control.
“I don’t know how to let it go.” Her voice had been flattened.
He put an arm around her.
“You can start by talking to Camille, having a conversation. Spend a few nights over there with Maddie. You might be surprised.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “And you can give me your list. Tear it out of your journal. Let me do for you—for us—what you can’t do right now. And if you still want, I’ll sign a prenup.”
Alex laughed. She couldn’t help it. His balmy humor meant he was back, that they were okay, at least for now. She tipped her head back and looked at the oak branches yawning wide above them. Momentary vertigo slipped her off from the tight hold she had of herself. A good thing, she decided.
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 12
