Freesia caught herself. A slow, deliberate breath did little to ease the punch of stress behind her breastbone.
“Don’t put your feet on that,” Freesia whispered. “Or eat on it. Or wrinkle it. Probably cost more than your house back home.”
Natalie’s mouth tipped to a frown. She stood and stared at the sofa as if Freesia said it had been constructed out of reticulated python skin.
The whirr of digital camera shutters and flashbulbs and voices sprinkled down from the top loft just below a three-story vaulted ceiling. Three sky windows running the length of the architecturally-heavy space ushered gray from the overcast skies. The lush, narrow courtyard, crowded with fountains and fireplaces and birdcages and random details, seemed supernatural, forbidden, the ambitious hobby of an eccentric.
“What does this place have to do with fashion?” asked Allison, nose to nose with a corkscrew-horned antelope, stuffed and mounted.
“Right?” agreed Natalie. “It’s like Johnny Depp meets a hoarding Miss Frances.”
“In some cobblestone alley in Romania.”
“So true.”
Freesia shushed the twins right about the time a trilling voice echoed through the space.
“There’s the Georgia peach I’ve been telling everyone about.” A shortish nasally man with an ambitious color palette on his jacket floated down the industrial stairs like he was Mr. Manhattan and they were a panel of d-list judges.
“Totally calling you that from now on,” muttered Allison under her breath.
So much like Charlotte. Scary similar.
Freesia shifted her portfolio to her left hand and extended her right. “Mr. Yu?”
A verbal puff erupted from the man’s lips. “Pshew. Mr. Yu was my father. Militaristic hard-ass.” And as if he had tripped across a cord that plunged his thoughts into darkness, he shuddered, then plugged it all back into his expression—light, energy, enthusiasm, teeth. “Call me Jon. Aren’t you a dollop of a thing?”
Jon pulled Freesia close for an air kiss on each cheek. She recovered her handshake, left hanging, by giving his elbow an affectionate squeeze. He smelled like old Hollywood and spilled diamonds and a thousand other things that were, to her, off-limits.
“These must be your nieces.”
Freesia introduced them. Charlotte would have been pleased. The girls collected their manners and used every last one of them—strong handshakes, eye contact, smile. Natalie even added sir to the end of her “Pleased to meet you.”
“Sir.” Jon repeated the word several more times, clearly trying to mirror the exact accented note before adding, “Quaint. Such a strong Germanic presence, hmm?”
Emphasis on strong, Germanic. Translation: beefy farm girls. Freesia’s mood shifted left of her centered, professional air.
Natalie and Allison shared a glance.
“Is this your studio?” asked Freesia, looking around for something to inspire a subject change.
“God, no.” Jon’s stink face was as exaggerated as his gestures. “This place is the stuff of nightmares. Has a killer French Provincial queen on the third floor, though. And the lighting—if only I could bottle it for photo shoots. I’d be a rich man.”
They were words that fit the space: grandiose and echoing, ostentatious and patronizing.
“You’d already be a rich man where we live,” said Natalie.
“Honey, I’d never fit in down there,” said Jon dryly. “You’d have to dress me in a flour sack and knock all my teeth out first.”
Allison scooped up the affront first. Freesia saw it in the roundness of her eyes, the way she took a subtle step backward, favoring proximity to a horned animal carcass at her shoulder over the world-renowned designer standing before them, and Freesia was back in a beach shack on the Atlantic, staring down one of her mother’s men, all of them, telling her to git on now, driftwood’s all you are, child, debris. The memory came like a high tide, thrashing and churning things long settled, in a place of nothingness, not at all like the peacock before them or the oppressive brick walls crumbling around them.
Her sinuses pinched, a horrifying precursor to tears she’d swallowed long ago. She searched for something to ground herself. New York, Free. You’re in New York. Birdcages. Gray skies. Not a damned wave in sight. Before she could speak, Natalie’s voice came, innocuous, guarded.
“Have you ever been to Mississippi?”
“Thankfully, no.” Jon climbed the first few steps before he turned toward Freesia. “Shall we get started?”
Freesia felt a twinge of reluctance. Two choices. Follow or lead.
Maybe it was because Natalie had mentioned Frances in their earlier conversation, brought her along with them into this bizarre funhouse with a hairy sofa that looked like black velvet, but the woman’s warning knocked around Freesia’s soul, quiet and violent—those people in New York are not gonna change me none—and settled firmly inside a place where Freesia desperately needed a foothold.
She glanced from Jon to the girls.
Their smiles mirrored each other’s, both strained. For the first time, maybe ever, Freesia felt a fierce alignment to something, someone, two someones, a pair of girls too innocent to know when an outsider judged them as less than who they were or were too polite to speak up.
She would be the gift Charlotte said she was.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” said Freesia.
Jon ruffled. “Excuse me?”
“When I learned I had the opportunity to meet the Jon Yu, to see you work, I thought I had won something. Things like that just don’t happen to people like me. I researched everything I could get my hands on about you—interviews about your initiatives to source raw cotton from Africa, podcasts where you talked about charitable clothing dumped into impoverished places where empowering local textile manufacturing was a far better solution to economic injustice. But in the short time we’ve been here, you’ve shown your philanthropy only extends as far as your biases.”
Her face was flushed, her hands damp. She thought perhaps she had said too much, yet it wasn’t quite enough.
“I want to make garments that empower women. All women. Their roots, their bodies, their identities. And that starts now.”
A soft tapping started overhead. Rain against the skylights. A clean rinse of her career before it had really started.
Pressure in her chest resurged. The man had put out a king’s ransom to bring them there, to put them up in a suite where nearly every surface shined, to carve time out of his four-figure hourly fee, and she was left feeling a sickening seed of ungratefulness, so she added, “Thank you for the invitation.”
He didn’t fall back on grand gestures; his expression offered nothing. He was a figurine, misplaced inside a Madame Broussard’s Wax Museum. Or maybe he was right where he belonged. The only thing Freesia knew for sure was that it wasn’t where she belonged.
At the Ironworks door, Allison called back, “You’re welcome for the cotton.”
So very Charlotte.
On the razor’s edge of tears, Freesia laughed.
11
Alex
Match Made in Devon was no stranger to free deliveries—especially on busy Saturdays. Local bakeries looking to ride the bustled silk train of the shop’s publicity, be it a Hollywood starlet gushing over one of Freesia’s originals or a hunky line of volunteer firemen, often sent goody boxes stuffed with business cards to entice future brides to consider their services. Charlotte had embraced the perk so much that she’d ordered a tiered chandelier cupcake stand. The box from Hot Crossed Buns Bakery over in Marthasville, however, came with a serious directive from the delivery boy.
“Are you Charlotte?” he asked.
Helmet in one hand, crushed box in the other, he presented a potent combination of gasoline and field.
“I can give it to her,” said Alex. Her gaze snagged his mode of delivery—a red dirt bike that had seen better decades, weeds stuck in the tires.
“No, ma’am
. Orders were to give this to Charlotte Strickland. Directly.”
Alex had no words, and even fewer desires to sample what was in the box. She fetched Charlotte from refereeing a spirited discussion between a bride-to-be and a mother in a tangerine pantsuit who used strapless and whore in the same utterance. Charlotte had never looked so relieved to be pulled out of the firing line, except maybe when she’d gone to Taffy’s to order a Monte Cristo sandwich on the day protesters had clashed with locals over the renaming of the town’s square park.
“Might want to cut off Mama Orange-is-the-New-Black over there from the complimentary champagne,” Charlotte whispered to Alex. “Gives her gas worse than her breath, too.”
Alex pulled some bills from the register and handed them to the kid, who fled on his bike like he was drag racing the prospect of being fired. And losing.
Charlotte opened the box.
The carnage was real.
Alex and Charlotte tilted their heads like synchronized swimmers.
“What do you think they were?” asked Charlotte.
Alex pointed at two particularly brutalized buttercream offerings in the corner. “Those have a letter on them. I think it spelled something.”
Right about this time, a woman browsing for a dress squealed with delight, “I love word scrambles,” which then brought about an entire thing built on a mystery—eleven cakes, eleven letters, as many players, and poised in the air, mid-bite by the cursing mama, a twelfth cupcake with a question mark iced on the top.
“It’s a question!” shouted one lively bride-to-be. “No one eat any more.”
No issue for Alex there. The cupcakes had already been handled more than a railing on the T into Boston.
The preposterous guesses—rats, tarantulas, grits—were sprinkled in among the decent ones like artisan and tiaras and Sinatra. That answer was Frances’s personal favorite. She was as committed to Ol’ Blue Eyes as she was to her painted-on eyebrows. A particularly resourceful sister of a bride put the letters into a word scramble ap on her phone.
“It says here it’s most likely two words. Again and start.”
“But it’s a question,” said Mama Whore, her teeth gummed with icing.
“Start Again?” The lively bride looked totally perplexed. She reached for the bakery box. “There’s writing in the box!”
Alex noticed the chicken scrawl of a familiar farmer: Theater. Tonight at 7. Your pick. She handed it to Charlotte. “This really is for you.”
Charlotte’s lips puckered and wobbled into a smile. Her eyes filled with tears.
After much begging on the part of customers desperate to hear the story behind the romantic overture, Charlotte was all too happy to relay the Evangeline-esque backstory of the union between her and Nash, minus the apathy. Falling out of love wasn’t good for business. She spent an inordinate amount of time on the history of Nash’s refusal to watch what he called her “tissue box movies” while the group of women indulged in the finest assortment of cakes Hot Crossed Buns had to offer.
“You should pick that new film with Delta Burke as the dying grandmother,” said the tech sister. “She plays cupid between her handyman and her granddaughter. Real tearjerker.”
Nods all around.
Alex was careful to delay her eye roll until she reached the office. She had wedged her feet into heels for this?
* * *
That afternoon, a bride-to-be driving a Ford that looked like it belonged in a Harry Potter novel and dressed in a pearl string, a peacoat, and auburn hair pinned up in victory rolls entered the bridal shop. She introduced herself as Mae or “friends call me Mabs”—Alex would have taken bets that wasn’t her real name—and cozied up right away to a fawning Charlotte, who was as vanilla as bottled extract but always about embracing someone’s kinks.
“People keep telling me I can’t get married in what I want to wear,” said Mae.
Charlotte offered her a sugar-dusted lemon cookie and settled her in the bawlin’ and stonewallin’ chair.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Vintage. Opulent. A Dior, a Hartnell, or a Givenchy, from the post-war Golden Age of couture.”
Charlotte had her hands folded in prayer, resting at her lips before the women finished speaking. “Our Mama would have loved you. Audrey Hepburn, all the way.”
The two finished each other’s sentences about growing up watching black-and-white movies and what Mae termed her creative obsession with the 1950s that she shared with her husband-to-be.
“He’s a pilot. We own Bird Dog Skydiving up near Yazoo City.”
Charlotte waggled a finger at her new bestie. “Aw. I see what you did there. ‘Bird Dog’. Just darling.”
“You should come out and give it a try sometime.” Mae produced a business card from her purse and handed it to Charlotte. “We also do banners for outdoor events. Could be a great promotion for your business.”
“We just might do that,” said Charlotte. “The advertising, not the jumping. I get squirrelly during thunderstorms.”
Alex suppressed an eye roll for the second time that day, thought it was about time to drive this Ford Anglia back up on the matrimonial road. “Depending on the time of year, we have some great A-line styles that have a vintage feel.”
Mae winced. “I’m just not sure that’s enough. I’ve been to twenty different bridal stores and even found a few costume places online, but it just doesn’t have that authenticity, you know?”
Alex not only didn’t know, she was drawing a complete blank. She wanted to ask if adding an oven mitt and crippling personal liberties to a dress might get her close enough to authenticity. Instead, she walked over to the register and plucked one of Freesia’s custom design cards from the holder.
“You should try Remains to be Seen,” said Charlotte. “Little antique place down on Price Road. Diane has a few racks in the back she stocks from the estate sales around here. Had the cutest pillbox hat last time I was in there. I could call her if you like. She could pull a few things before you—”
“Charlotte,” snapped Alex. “Phone.”
Her sister’s expression pinched. “I didn’t hear it ring.”
Alex gave her the best get-your-ass-over-here look she could muster, followed that with a sugar-dusted smile for Mae’s benefit. The moment Charlotte rounded the counter, Alex put a cordless phone receiver to her ear and yanked her inside the office.
“What on earth?” said Charlotte.
“You’re sending her to Diane?”
“She wants authentic. We can’t give her that.”
Alex waited for the Edison bulb to click in her sister’s brain.
It didn’t.
Alex lifted Freesia’s business card between them. A business card sandwich with noses as bread. “We have someone here who can make her a Big Bird gown with white ostrich feathers if that’s what gets her misogynistic husband off. For the right price, of course.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Oh?” Alex buried her face in her hands. “It all makes perfect sense now.”
“What does?”
“Spreadsheets that don’t add up. That last year, our cost to acquiring new customers was lower and now, since Maddie was born and I’m no longer here, sales have dropped. You’re sending them away.”
Alex felt like she’d been hit by an anvil between her legs. Labor pains all over again, only this time, the hemorrhage was money. Her money, to start a consulting business. Freesia’s money to travel, to go somewhere not Devon and stitch clothes. Charlotte’s money to take home to Nash and be the really great wife and mom Alex knew she had in her.
“This was an exception and you know it,” said Charlotte.
“I don’t know it. I’m not here.” Alex sank into the office chair and kicked off the shoes that were making her miserable. How the hell had she used to wear these things every day? “Your first thought when someone walks through that door should be the bottom line—our bottom line. You sink, we all sink, remember?�
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“My first thought is the customer. Always has been. Was for Mama, too.”
“And look where that got her, Charlotte. A business that floundered for years and stripped Mama and Daddy of every bit of savings they had.” Alex tipped the desk photo of Stella Irene and Elias on its glass front. It was a constant reminder of how things had been, pulling them back to the tired, unsuccessful ways. “Leading with your heart is what makes you…” Gullible. Innocent. Whimsical. “…Charlotte. But leading a business based on emotions is a sure way to close those doors out there, permanently. Where does that leave the women who come here for more than just dresses? Where does that leave the town that’s so proud of the legacy upstairs?”
Alex left one thing out of her mental list: tender.
Charlotte’s bottom lip quivered. For the second time that day, she cried.
Alex felt like the crumbs on the floor left over from cupcake scrabble. She felt like the dust on the crumbs left over from cupcake scrabble. She would do well to remember the tremendous emotional strain of a marriage in shambles. How Charlotte had been her biggest support when she left Michael.
She pulled Charlotte into a hug, offered what she hoped was a reassuring “It’ll be okay. We’ll make it,” then called her Evangeline, a nickname Alex reserved for those times when it felt like her ribs had cracked open and the only one she’d let inside was her sister. Her true sister.
Charlotte sniffed against Alex’s lapel. “You smell like spit up.”
Her half-teary, half-laughing tone inspired Alex to smile. She added one more thing to her mental list: magnetic.
The door chime brought them back to the world beyond. Maddie fussed. Jonah’s voice resonated.
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 8