“And you fix…everything.”
“Not everything, Alex. Certainly not me.”
She didn’t want to guess the ways Jonah was broken or what role she had played in it, so she swung, gently, gingerly, ghostly. The barely-there movement was a balm to her guilt.
“Since Katherine died, I’ve felt that same restlessness that once drove me away. Like something’s happening somewhere else, and I need to be part of it.” His heels tapped, knees shifted, a manifestation of that restlessness, as if his body aimed to prove his words. “I took a job in Jackson.”
She stopped swinging. Soles pressed to the floor, fighting the physics that wanted to keep her moving forward. Out of the things Jonah might have admitted, news that the most evergreen man she knew was picking up roots and moving wasn’t in Alex’s possible realm.
“You hate the city.”
“Businessman from Metairie is putting money into four blocks of Capitol Street. Town council thought an African American Library and Museum that had been on their wish list for decades was the perfect bookend to the revitalization project. One of the council members saw what I did with some of the antebellum places around here and offered me the lead contracting job. Said I showed attention to detail and a respect for history the project required.”
Alex didn’t doubt that his talents were on point for the project; she doubted being tied to a building for years would pacify his rattling soul.
“That’s amazing. Such an honor, really.” Her congrats held far too much of everything she didn’t feel.
“The head of the foundation responsible for most of the museum’s funding sits on the board of an elite private school. They offered Isabel tuition until the project’s completion and a stipend based on merit after. She’d have a real shot at a place like Brown, if she wanted it.”
He said it like Brown was situated at the end of the world. Sometimes, she supposed, it was.
“When do you leave?”
“Three weeks,” he said. “I haven’t told her yet.”
Alex dug her heels into the ground. This time, the swing’s motion brought a resurgence of nausea. She understood none of it. She had only just recently—like thirty minutes ago—considered becoming a CEO, being anywhere in the country, occupying a place that gave her the best shot at making her feel something—anything—again. Never had she imagined a Devon without Jonah.
“How do you think she’ll take it?”
He shrugged. “This is the only place she’s known. Her mother is everywhere. She won’t let me get rid of Katherine’s clothes. Sometimes I find her sitting inside the spare bedroom closet where I put her things, wrapped in one of her dresses or hugging her shoes.”
Alex turned the bird charm on her bracelet, gave it a full rotation before she dared remember all the things she had done with her father since his passing. Nightcaps on the balcony, overlooking Boston; Sunday puzzles in The Globe, sunny-side up eggs, the way he liked them; his best fedora and his apricot-and-sky-blue tie she wore around the house on tight deadlines because he once called them his luck combo. Turns out, the magic was as empty as his pretense of being Mendenhal’s top regional sales executive. Alex knew the craving to crawl up inside a memory and exist to the exclusion of all else. She also knew, had she been in Devon, like Charlotte, his memory might have held her captive. She didn’t want that for Isabel.
“Sometimes it takes leaving to hit a reset button,” Alex said.
“That what happened when you left Boston?”
Alex split into two then. One part of her stayed, rocking, the perfect statue of control. The other scooted beside her, where Jonah refused to sit, and screamed things at him for pushing, always pushing for a truth she could not give.
He leaned forward, his joined hands centimeters from her knee. He was breathless from something inexplicable, his words rushing. “I’m sorry about Michael. I am. But I’m not sorry you’re here. And if I knew you were going to stay, not run again, I’d stay, too.”
Oh God, she was on his lap, in the grove, on her knees—all at once. “Jonah…you don’t understand.”
“I don’t. Only because you haven’t explained it to me. Charlotte told me about the night you climbed behind the wheel of your dad’s truck, that same night after I stood my ground and told him I would marry you someday, take care of you the way he always did, no matter what he had to say about it. Charlotte was there, Alex, sleeping in the bed of the truck under the stars but not really asleep, and heard everything. Your dad didn’t say ‘Let that boy alone.’ He said ‘best not leave that boy alone.’ He knew how upset I was. He didn’t forbid you from seeing me at all. You and I had nothing to do with him.”
Not how she remembered it.
Alex stood. The porch was crowded, chairs that didn’t belong, obstacles she didn’t want to face—apparitions of her father, her lies, her last perfect love. She shuffled around Jonah, so much more the self that had railed moments earlier.
“I wanted to please him.”
Jonah followed her to the door. “There was something else. I must have done something or not done something. I need the truth, Alex, before I pick up what’s left of my family and move a hundred miles from the only real home I’ve ever known because I’m chasing some delusion I had when I was seventeen.”
Alex was close enough to his face to not be able to take it all in at once: his stern jaw, hair disheveled from the humid air, pitched brows above his wide, exposed eyes, the steam of his breath at her cheek. As close as she was at eighteen when he displayed the same vulnerability and she seized him by the neck and kissed him hard and hot after they had argued. Proximity would not unearth her secret.
Nothing would unearth her secret.
“I made mistakes. No different than the rest of us.” She pressed her mouth into a hard line to keep truths he so desperately wanted from tumbling past her lips.
“Whatever it was, we can fix it.”
“Because you can fix anything, right?”
Jonah pinched the bridge of his nose, paced, shot off in a fresh direction, away from her. “Damn it, Alex. I don’t pretend to know what happened to you, all those years in between, all those years being Mrs. Michael Leighton. But you came into town dripping Boston and high society and now you’re sitting on my dusty swing, in my world, and you’re all Devon, the way it should have been. For the first time since that night we fell asleep beside each other at the ruins, I see possibilities. I see you.”
She wanted to reach the door, flee, but his confession drained her of the will to move, to breathe. The only truth she could offer slipped free.
“We can’t go back.”
“Who says?”
“There’s too much you don’t know.”
“Then tell me.”
She shook her head. Teeth trapped behind her lips planted hard, biting.
“Why not, Alex?” His notes were wild, tapped, exhausted; his expression was injured. He braced his palm against the brick house, his chest expanding and contracting.
All over again, she was breaking him. But filleting herself in shame would not make him feel better. Hatred was a far worse sentence for them both than wondering.
“Because you would no longer see the possibilities.”
He laid his head against his raised arm and blew out a long breath. Like watching the final breath of someone you love, letting go. The two parts left divided—relief and mourning. She crossed his porch to the glass doors and pressed a kiss to the stubble at his cheek.
His eyelids slow-closed and remained that way.
“You deserve better than me,” she whispered. “Go fix your historical building. That’s the only way the past will ever become the present.”
Alex went inside, crouched beside the rug, woke Bear.
Jonah’s voice came, extraordinarily deep. “Let me drive you home.”
“It’s nice out,” she said gently, so as not to awaken Isabel. “Vet said it was good for him to walk.” Help him stay longer, unlike
Daddy, unlike Michael.
Bear’s collar tags clinked lightly, like windchimes in the distant grove. In his old age, her Belgian shepherd mix still looked at her as if he would do anything to please her. Her throat squeezed.
Alex became aware of Jonah picking up Isabel, her mumbled words against his shoulder, him leaning down to swipe a stuffed animal off the sofa, presumably her favorite, one she could not live without. It was a snapshot in perfection: low, warm light; unconditional embrace; how it should be with the exception of Katherine gone. Alex savored it as long as possible, then led Bear outside. She wanted to kick off her shoes and run, but of course, running was impossible. Bear kept her grounded. He needed her.
For the five blocks back to her parents’ place, a distance she could cover at seventeen in less than a minute, Bear crept beside her, his nails brushing against the asphalt, his lungs whistling slightly inside his exhales. For once, not running seemed right.
* * *
From the moment Alex drew breath that April morning, she knew the day would be different. Different, like the day when she’d walked in on Michael and Soline, asleep, her bedroom spicy with the foreign stench of their lovemaking. When she’d sat on the corner of the bed, rewound the camera on the tripod, and watched while they awoke because she always had to have every last piece of the equation. Different, like the day Mama lied about why Daddy had left but kept looking out the kitchen window at the trailer in the field. Different, the way spring’s peaceful, blooming edges in the South eventually fold to electrical storms and jagged lightning bolts. She could no more explain it than she could piece together the nature of different. Just different.
Inside Match Made in Devon, skies were bright. Julia Downer-Jacobson’s wedding party—all but the Hollywood actress, who’d had to catch a later flight due to a CSI drama callback—filled the shop with high, feathery voices afloat on complimentary champagne. Freesia was a hummingbird, buzzing around them, straight pins secured between her teeth, her cheeks awash in color from the Scrabble-worthy words the bride used to gush over the handmade creations. Alex couldn’t pinpoint the moment Freesia began to walk even taller, more assured than she had been that first day in the lawyer’s office, but somehow in the nearly three months since she had arrived in Devon, it happened.
Charlotte, meanwhile, sat on the bench outside with a reporter from Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger Lifestyles section, a feature on the shop to be included in their upcoming bridal season insert. She had worn her hair down that day, touched up her roots, added a bit more makeup, but her smile was uniquely organic. Her sister still chased prom queen, but she didn’t have to. Alex didn’t tell her that enough.
Around eleven, a man entered the store. Wrinkled suit, forgettable tie, stern expression. He was out of place; the way a shark is at a yacht party. He asked a passing bridesmaid if she knew an “Alexandra March-Leighton.” Before she could respond, Alex approached.
“I’m Alexandra.”
The shark handed her a business envelope stamped with the name of a legal services firm in Jackson. Without another word, he exited the shop. The wedding party barely noticed. Not so of Charlotte, who cut her interview short and passed the man in the doorway. Not so of Freesia, who, in mid-stitch to a bead that had fallen loose, secured the needle in the dress fabric and excused herself from the ring of chattering women to join Alex and Charlotte. Their left-at-the-altar expressions and her loose, watery gut floated a thought at just how intertwined their emotional investment in the shop had become.
Alex unfastened the envelope and reached for the packet. The primary law office’s return address on the cover sheet: 33 Broad Street, Suite 1202, Boston, MA.
Her stomach buoyed straight up to her throat. Not shop business at all.
She shoved the packet back inside the envelope.
Charlotte and Freesia exchanged looks and returned to their tasks.
Alex settled in a chair inside the beautiful office Jonah had crafted, door closed. Her breath shallowed; her mind reeled through possibilities—breach of contract with a company, intellectual property she had created with her team, a summons to testify in litigation totally unrelated to Robert’s consulting firm. The most likely possibility, however, made the gaiety and hope tittering beyond the door even harder to hear: one marriage was ending as another was beginning.
She slid the papers free.
PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE WITHOUT MINOR CHILDREN. Petitioner/Husband, Michael Aaron Leighton versus Alexandra March-Leighton, wife/Respondent.
All the white correction tape in the world couldn’t cover this.
Alex’s stomach processed before her brain. In retrospect, adding a water closet in the office had been Jonah’s best idea. She was sure to thank him and God for small miracles while on her knees in the privacy of her personal failure. Something was wrong. Beyond her entire world diverging, beyond Michael ejecting her off into some parallel universe where she could no longer puzzle things out and everything she cared about was being systematically stripped from her life. She felt like holy hell. Cancer, maybe. A tumor would be right in line with her trajectory of late.
Unless….
No! The idea was absurd. Besides, she had been pregnant before. Nothing—nothing close to this. And hadn’t she and Michael tried, early on? For years, nothing. No! It can’t be. Not now.
Alex crawled out of the restroom, toward the desk. A canary-colored legal pad sheet drew her attention. Upon closer inspection, Michael’s handwritten note.
It’s time, Alex. I’m sorry I didn’t give you this the night I came to see you. I’d appreciate your immediate attention to this. Soline and I will be married May 24.
“The dog hater?” she said aloud, then louder to no one and everyone within a two-block radius, “He’s marrying the goddamned dog hater?”
As if on cue, a light knock sounded at the door, followed by Charlotte’s syrupy accent.
“Sweetheart? Now, I know this door didn’t lock itself.”
Alex curled up on the floor. It was blissfully clean, smelled like fresh-cut lumber, smoothed with care, meticulous in striations and beauty, cool against her hot cheek. She could have stayed there an eternity.
“I’ll be right out here,” reiterated Charlotte. As if she had a choice. The spare key was in the drawer above Alex’s head and Jonah hadn’t shown his face around the shop for days.
Charlotte’s shadows, two shoes, disappeared.
Alex pulled her knees to her chest. She closed her eyes to the air conditioner draft skating beneath the door and drying her eyeballs. In darkness, she pieced together what she knew. She and Michael had sex that night before the ink had dried on the paper at the law office; he was a clichéd bastard with sex tapes and dirty laundry enough to thrive in politics; her flaws had been too numerous to sustain a marriage.
Oh, one more thing.
She’d bet Beatrice’s hardbody-loving windfall at Naughty-but-Nice Charity Bingo that the final piece of her marriage puzzle was growing inside her. Precisely what she deserved.
19
Charlotte
Right about the time Rachel Lee Copeland, Hollywood A-lister, arrived via black-tinted SUV, driven by a guy in dress clothes and sunglasses, Charlotte’s plans for the perfect final fitting went to pot.
Even dressed down, the woman was impossibly beautiful. Her peach skin was otherworldly in tone and luster. Locks that had been meticulously colored for optimum highlights of her cheekbones were pulled back in an exquisite messy twist. She moved inside her high-end clothes like she had in the final train station scene of her blockbuster romantic comedy, Shorten The Road, when she realized that Ian Vanderbilts’s character loved her and gave up his family’s legacy to slum out a life of impoverished bliss with her in the Irish countryside.
Julia squealed and made a production of Rachel’s arrival. The history between the two was palpable. Julia clutched Rachel’s wrist and dragged her around for introductions.
“This is Charlotte,” said Ju
lia. “I feel like I’ve known her forever. She takes care of us like this is her home and I’m the most important bride on earth.”
Rachel extended her hand. “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s a pleasure.”
Which was right about the time Nash crashed through the front door and hollered, “Damn it, Charlotte. We lost nearly every chicken to a coyote last night because you didn’t fix the gate.”
He wore his cowboy hat and work clothes—patches, dirty butt, and all—and smelled like the second coming of the apocalypse after hellfire had scorched the land and all the feces in its wake. His muddy boots left a clod trail across the shop’s wire-brushed hardwood she had treated the night before.
Every voice in the shop quieted. Well, everyone but Niles Demarco crooning through the speakers about one and only loves. Rachel slapped on her best turning-point scene look, no acting required. Her hand sagged back to her side. She clutched her purse a little tighter.
Had Jonah installed the trapdoor like Charlotte had joked about—the one for brides when too many opinions crowded out her voice—Charlotte would have activated it, wiggled free of the foundation, and sprinted down Second Street, carrying on like she couldn’t in polite company. As it was, she was on the brink of frying up some testicles with a composed verbal lashing. Instead, she opted for dragging her husband by his stinky sleeve behind the register—the best she could do because, damn it all, Alex had locked herself in the office all day, not answering Charlotte’s repeated requests to open up.
“You can’t just crash in here, steaming like a rhino’s hot ass, while there are customers.” Half yell, half whisper, Charlotte’s take-down sounded like it pushed past the strained throat of someone afflicted with laryngitis. “Sadie said she’d take care of it before school.”
“She tied a shoelace around the latch. You can’t expect a fifteen-year-old to know a coyote can chew through that in one bite. Bottom line, you said you’d do it.”
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 18