Jonah backed one foot behind the other until he was off the flagstone path and his boots gnawed the dry grass. He set the branding rod where he’d found it, where it had been for so long that Alex couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t there. The fire’s light no longer dashed his face.
“You may think you have everyone around here fooled, that you’re staying out of some loyalty to your family, but I see you, Alex. I know you. You’re running. It’s what you do. Only this time, you’re running the wrong way. You’ve hurt too many people here for any of us to ever think about getting ahold of you again.”
Her stomach sickened, the whiskey in it bubbling against her throat. She was on the verge of running after him, but in the logic system she had created, Jonah was a resounding X. When the fire died for good, she dragged the blanket into the garage. Her father visited her.
Let that boy alone, Alexandra.
She climbed into the passenger seat of his black truck. Loss was a shadowy driver, sitting beside her, always in command, reaching out a grisly hand to hold her back when life stopped too suddenly. She felt its impact now, in the skin stretched over her ribs, bruised nearly beyond repair. Somehow, this loss—Jonah’s acceptance—stung worse than the losses stacking up in her life.
Still, no tears.
* * *
“Please, if I could just get five minutes of her time.”
“I’m sorry, Miss….”
“Leighton. March-Leighton. I just lost her six million dollars. She’ll know me.”
Alex kicked off her heels and paced the bridal shop’s second floor, earbuds rammed in her ears, hands-free microphone skimming her neck. Without the paraphernalia that once hung on the walls, the wig wreath and the taxidermied jackrabbit mounted to a plaque and engraved with some inside joke about batteries, the space carried a bright, minimalist quality highly conducive to work.
Too bad the roof renovation sounded like woodpeckers drilling into tin cans.
“Hold, please.”
Pop music filled the space where the Aima CEO’s administrative assistant had been. The on-point selection of Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love wasn’t lost on Alex.
More like hemorrhaging profits if Alex couldn’t get through. She had tracked the distribution gaffe to a human-software interface error at the warehouse level. One ready-to-go software update and product would flow again. Literally.
The assistant returned to the line. “Miss Leighton?”
Close enough. “Yes?”
“She asked that I take a message.”
“I have the fix for her company. We could do an overnight backup, and I’d have Aima running by the time the drivers hit their snooze bars at dawn.”
“Fix…for…company…” Clearly, writing something down. “Is that all?”
Alex draped the railing, her body devoid of patience. “Look, I know we’ve compromised her trust, but outsourcing a patch will only delay the problem.”
“Best number you can be reached?”
Forehead against the handrail, Alex began a steady hammering to match the one overhead. “The same number I left the last three times.” Alex repeated her cell digits.
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thank—”
The call ended.
“You.”
Alex snatched off her headset, wrestled the wires free of her top button, hair, and necklace and flung it across the room to her makeshift desk. She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids to try and stop the throbbing behind her right eye. When she looked up again, she saw she wasn’t alone.
Isabel stood at the top of the stairs.
Alex froze. Her face prickled with warmth. She was as much on display as the stunned jackrabbit had been without an inside joke to spare.
“Hello,” said Isabel.
“Hi.”
Isabel’s hands went to the camera around her neck. Alex wondered if the girl went anywhere without it.
“May I take your picture?”
Alex remembered Jonah’s admonishment, that Isabel was required to ask before catching people unaware. Despite a frustrating morning that had played out in a loosened shirt hem, a rather large glob of yogurt residue that had splotched her pants, and a disheveled up-do, Alex didn’t want to be one to kill that courtesy lesson in its infancy.
“Sure.”
“You’re very pretty.”
Isabel’s ts were crisp, carefully delineated. The child didn’t carry the lazy consonants common to the south. Alex had only just wondered if Katherine had spoken with such precision when Isabel lifted the camera and the digital shutter gave a muted beep-click.
“So are you.”
Beep-click.
“Do you ever wear your hair down?” Isabel asked.
“Sometimes.”
“It’s already halfway there.”
Isabel’s scrutiny took Alex’s face from heat to burn. She slid the pins from her hair. Immediately, the substantial weight on her crown slid low and evaporated. Messy locks fell against her cheeks. The child was clearly gifted in the power of persuasion.
Beep-click.
“I want to be a CEO when I grow up,” said Isabel.
“Why’s that?”
“My grandpa was a CEO. He told me it’s like holding a camera.”
Katherine’s father. Jacob never knew his grandparents.
“How so?”
“The camera sees the big picture. Everything that’s behind someone and things people can’t see because they’re not looking in the right place. Sometimes there’s things that shouldn’t be in the picture at all. And sometimes, there are things that don’t belong but they make the picture interesting.”
“Sounds like a wise man.”
“He takes care of the people in his company, too. I already do that with Dad.”
An ache wiggled behind Alex’s breastbone. No child should ever have to take on the burden of a parent’s grief. Alex wondered if Jonah knew he needed care.
“What kind of company do you want to run?”
“I’m pretty sure birds need a CEO. Someone to take care of them.” She pointed her camera at the room’s skeleton—uncovered pipes, wires, cobwebs—beep-click-beep-click. “What do you do?”
The biggest part of Alex’s job: explaining what she did to adults. She’d never broken it down for a child before, but Isabel seemed smarter than most kids. “I recognize patterns in things, like package shipping or cell towers or airline routes, and I help businesses make the patterns better. More efficient.”
“Do you take care of people in your company, too?”
“I’m not the CEO.”
Isabel crouched to snap a photo of the railing’s loose spindle. “You should be.”
Alex spun the thought in her mind, but reality set in. Once word got out that she’d caused a billion-dollar company’s first-quarter shares to tank, she would never work in the industry again.
“I don’t know. Patterns are one thing. It’s the big picture that throws me sometimes.”
“Best pattern I ever saw was on a blue jay.”
Alex remembered the wallpaper in her mother’s white room. “Yeah?”
Isabel nodded. “He landed in a branch that fell on the road after a storm. Berries had rolled everywhere, and he was gobbling them up. When he wasn’t flying, his wings made this pattern of black and white and different blues. It looked like the glass windows at my grandma’s church—the scene where Jesus walks on water. He let me get real close and take a picture. I didn’t hear the car coming.”
The ache in Alex’s chest magnified.
“Grandpa snatched me up, though. He told me right then to always take a step back before I take a picture, ’cause I might be missing something important. The bird was okay, too.”
Alex sat down to keep from staring. The girl was every bit her mother, how Jonah had described her. Alex wanted to distance herself from the darkness she had built up around the idea of Katherine, but the girl enchanted her. Tension eased from
Alex’s body. Hammering ceased. Between Isabel’s first photograph and now, the ache behind Alex’s eye had lifted.
“I already have my own business. I sell bracelets at recess.”
Isabel held out her arm. Crowding her wrist, upwards of twenty bracelets made of hemp strands and baubles and woven floss, each one unique, brightly colored.
“Ten cents of every sale goes to the bird sanctuary in Louisiana where my friend Margaret works.”
“Then I’m pretty sure I’ll need one.” Alex pulled cash from her wallet. “Which one should I pick?”
“This one.” Isabel isolated a black and white and blue weave with a miniature silver bird charm hanging from it. “Because you like patterns.”
Stella Irene thought the pattern was just about the perfect thing. Meant to be.
“It’s perfect.”
Isabel transferred the bracelet to Alex’s wrist. For Michael’s first state election victory party, Anne Betron & Company had loaned Alex a vintage-inspired platinum and diamond cuff worth more than her husband’s luxury import. The garish monstrosity paled in comparison to Isabel’s blue jay-inspired piece.
“Now do this.” Isabel turned high-fashion photographer and instructed Alex to use her bracelet hand to toss back her hair.
Alex did.
Isabel giggled. “Again.”
This time, Isabel snapped a photo.
Alex hammed up another, complete with a kissy-face for the bird charm.
Beep-click.
Another giggle. This time, the pair of them.
“There you are, Ibby.” Jonah’s stern voice accompanied his heavy footsteps on the stairs. “I told you this morning that the second floor is off-limits.”
Isabel’s eyes widened.
“It’s okay, really,” said Alex. “She was giving me business advice.”
Jonah’s brows shot up. “Yeah?”
“Pretty savvy, that one.”
“Miss Alex bought a bracelet.” Isabel swiped the bill off the desk to show her dad but stopped short. “I don’t have change.”
“You don’t need it,” said Alex. “Save it for the birds.”
“Look, Dad!” As if he hadn’t just witnessed the exchange.
“I see,” he said, slowly, gently, more to Alex than Isabel. Then, as if he caught himself staring, he shoved his hands in his pockets and filled the lull with chatter.
“Sorry about the banging. We’re finished now. Metal roof you picked out looks nice with the old stone.”
He spoke renovations—subflooring, ordered materials, something about a building inspector. All Alex heard was you’ve hurt too many people here for any of us to ever think about getting ahold of you again. Curled up in the cab of her daddy’s truck, Alex had taken inventory. As a pushy valedictorian bound for the Ivy League from small-town Mississippi, she had probably squashed some feelings, but she was hard-pressed to list names. Any name but one.
Jonah had stopped talking to crouch and look at the screen on Isabel’s camera. By his patient and thoughtful expressions, Isabel advanced the day’s photos slowly. At one cluster, Jonah’s gaze found Alex.
She recognized the look by heart. Hadn’t seen it in decades, certainly not the look he stoked hard and angry over the fire pit. It was familiar, the way someone grows accustomed to the bedroom ceiling or the direction in which to find the sunset because it’s always there, but it was far from empty. The unapologetic heat in his gaze plied her belly, worked it over in the span of a breath, slipped low and tight and heavy, before another beep-click left her vacant. Isabel had lifted her camera free of her father’s hands and captured his face.
He blinked back into himself. The intrusiveness barely registered.
Alex smiled. “How many times a day does that happen?”
“Too many.”
Jonah unfolded his lean frame. He moved slower now. Alex supposed never really getting good at one thing had taken a toll on his body. Or the frenzy of youth had now settled into the true speed of Devon. She shouldn’t be there, wearing a bird bracelet from a girl who looked like his dead wife, wondering how that slowness translated inside her.
“I don’t have to ask Dad,” Isabel answered.
“I see,” said Alex.
He was already gone. At the top step, but gone. Moment passed. His words ascended past the railing. “We’ll leave you to your work.”
Isabel waved and followed.
Alex rotated the bracelet on her wrist until the black, white and blue strands blurred together to create a bigger picture. She picked up her phone again and dialed.
9
Charlotte
It had happened before. Bound to happen again. No one went through such a stressful time in life without getting a little something lost in translation. The Ramsay bride insisted the bridesmaid gown shade was salmon ella after she saw it listed that way on Charlotte’s order form—salmon for color, dress designer, Ella. The Hayes-Beauregard wedding last June had a mother-in-law who kept calling the forest glen shade of the bridesmaid gowns foreskin. Lord, Charlotte had heard everything from flaccid to encephalitis, but this was the first time she had an audience cracking up around her. She darned near lost her manners right there on the phone.
“Well, now, I’m certain the shade was ecru. I have it on file right here,” Charlotte said to the out-of-state bridesmaid. “Ecru is a lovely shade of blush. Very feminine.”
Alex was going over the shop’s taxes beside her at the register. Something about the office combusting if she had to co-exist with Jonah in that tiny space. Charlotte never imagined things had gotten so contentious between them. But her sister was doing more eavesdropping now than number crunching.
Charlotte held the phone away from her ear. She was nothing if not accommodating.
“I wrote it down,” said the woman on the phone. “Ecru-ment.” She then spelled it. Sure enough, ecrument, not even ecru and mint.
Alex broke into a wide smile. She wore it well, like bringing out a pair of Mama’s sparkly earrings after they’d been buried in a drawer.
“Maybe you heard her speaking about wedding favors.” Charlotte commandeered the phone back. “Peppermints or some such.”
“I’ll have the bride call you,” said the woman.
“That might be best.”
The moment she hung up the call, Alex said, “Order the shitty dress, Charlotte.”
“Bless her heart.”
They shared a greater laugh. The kind that percolates at the surface for some time and brings everyone’s mood right along with it. Charlotte only wished Freesia had been there for the ride. Once the cold snap lifted, Freesia had taken to exploring the countryside in Daddy’s old truck, sketchbook riding shotgun. Said nature was the only place that sparked her creativity. One day, she even headed to the Gulf before Charlotte and Alex could warn her about the fickleness of Daddy’s Ford. After an afternoon spent on the pier and a bartered cheese sandwich for a jump start, she aimed her headlights back to Devon. Until she pulled up on March land, Charlotte wasn’t certain they’d ever see her again. Something kept her coming back. Charlotte hoped it was enough to sustain her while they navigated the shop out of the ditch.
A woman yelled outside the shop.
Charlotte ran to the display windows, Alex on her heels, Jonah already out the door. Bernice stood on the sidewalk in her two words, one finger t-shirt, sun hat, and red stretch pants, bakery sacks fallen to Bethel Lane, donuts rolling into what little traffic existed. As Jonah reached her, she pointed up. At Match Made in Devon.
The sisters charged outside.
Donuts weren’t the only carnage.
A half-dozen furry carcasses littered the sidewalk. Upon closer inspection: bushy-tailed gray squirrels.
“What on earth?”
No sooner had the words exited Charlotte’s lips than movement in the dogwood branches overhead caught their collective attention. A chub squirrel the size of Beatrice’s head barked and chattered and carried on before squeezing
down on four haunches and exercising his freedom to fly.
Directly at the shop’s newly-installed metal roof.
The little guy’s legs turned cartoon-like, a blur of cyclical motion that gained him no purchase on the slippery surface. What unfolded was a slow-motion scramble with only one destination: the rodent afterlife.
Charlotte gasped and looked around for an impromptu fireman’s net. Without a planter or flower pot to spare, she snatched the next best thing—Bernice’s sun hat.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bernice attempted a defensive move to retrieve her hat.
Jonah strong-arm blocked her.
Charlotte lined up the flailing squirrel like she was the clutch softballer she was in high school. By the time he reached the lip of the sheet metal, the animal was a twisted ball of fur, ass over head and prone, catching substantial air. One sidestep right then overcorrected to account for the stiff breeze. The squirrel landed cattywampus inside the hat, sprang back out for the nearest branch, and scrambled away.
Every one of them stood in reverent silence. Earl Frizeal, who had stopped his shuffling toward the barber shop, studied the massacre, removed his netted cap, and placed it over his pacemaker-ed heart.
“Who thought a metal roof was a good idea?” asked Earl.
Everyone looked at Alex.
Isabel picked right then to walk up, backpack on her shoulders. “What’s going—?”
Jonah covered her eyes.
She squirmed free.
Charlotte handed Bernice her hat.
“I don’t want it back. Rat probably took a dump in it.”
They all looked.
“Fittin’ for a bridal shop, I’d say,” said Earl.
“The leaping?” asked Bernice.
Earl shook his head. “The death. Hope, freedom, sex, you name it.”
This time, Jonah covered Isabel’s ears.
She squirmed free.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 8