Freesia didn’t want someone else’s hurt to become hers, but she was trapped by the rain and the endless pines beyond the window and a radio on the fritz and a spirit that was so much better than hers.
“I had bottled up so much anger, I did stupid stuff. Spent a night in jail,” Jonah said. “It forced me to tell my adoptive parents what was going on. A few days later, my dad threw an empty suitcase on my bed. I thought he was taking me to child services, that they no longer wanted a kid who brought them trouble. Instead, he drove me to Missouri.”
No longer disinterested, she pulled her attention from the highway. On a journey—his journey, in many ways, hers, escaping the cloying perfection that Alex and Charlotte superimposed over their flawed parents, was refreshing. “Did you see your real father?”
“Yeah.”
Though the highway was straight with nothing to distract him, Jonah didn’t continue. She resolved herself to believe that one word was all she would get when his voice slipped out, even and indifferent.
“My adopted father dropped me off on the next block and waited, engine idling. First snow of the season. The second my boots made an imprint, I wanted to turn around. But my dad was watching me through the windshield, and I’d already disappointed him enough. So I found the address. A man came out of this crumbling bungalow, lit a cigarette, hollered something to someone inside. Guess he didn’t expect anyone standing there in the cold. He settled in one of those folding metal chairs, stared, took long drags and flicked ashes everywhere. I couldn’t get past the selfishness of it all. Him, wanting a life where he wasn’t my father. Me, wanting to prove I was better off without him. Nothing good comes out of two people meeting with only selfishness.”
“What happened?”
Jonah shrugged. “I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to know what kind of life he had left me for so I called him mister and told him I was cold and asked if I could come inside for a few minutes to warm up.”
His voice thickened. Firm words pushed past whatever stayed inside him.
“He took a long drag and said ‘best move on, son.’ I never knew if he recognized me. Either way, it was enough. Was all I needed to make decisions from there on.”
Freesia’s emotions suspended. How Jonah must have felt.
“I got word that he died a few years later. He had stopped to help someone change a tire, got hit. Guess everyone has some good inside. Maybe his best was leaving me barefoot on a country road.”
Jonah merged onto the interstate, headed east, seemingly grateful for the diversion of traffic, navigating a road so straight and narrow there wasn’t anywhere to look but behind. Planes appeared on highways signs. How were they at the airport already? She had lost all sense of time due to sleep deprivation. Her mother, Jay and his directive to find her place, the storm she continued to inspire between her sisters—all conspired to lean her back on her choices. But, like Jonah, she had already disappointed enough.
At the passenger drop-off, Jonah hopped out and hefted her suitcase over the edge of the truck bed. He even telescoped the handle and faced it the right way. He was a good man. Left selfishness far behind, if he had ever been worried he hadn’t.
Jonah’s smile was an emotional hangover. “No one can blame you for your feelings, especially not you, but if you focus on finding people’s best, their worst can’t touch you anymore.” He held out his hand.
Freesia shook it.
“Safe travels, Freesia. Show those New Yorkers how it’s done.”
His follow-up smile reached his eyes. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and merged into the through-lane.
Freesia rolled her bag to the baggage check. She had packed too much, more than when she had arrived in Devon, more than would fit into a carry-on by half, far more of a burden than she remembered.
A woman behind the counter greeted her, corralled Freesia’s paperwork in her hand, asked, “Where to, today?”
High glass windows in the lobby did nothing but showcase the gray outside. Freesia encountered the unlikely impulse to run back out, feel the drizzle on her heated cheeks. And do what? Jonah was long gone. She had no choice but to move forward.
“New York…how exciting.”
Freesia’s pulse took off inside her chest. Wheels up, she was already gone. “You know what…?”
The precipice in her voice caused the ticket agent to glance up from her screen, pause.
“I don’t know…” whispered Freesia.
The agent blinked. “I’m sorry, Miss. Don’t know what?”
“Where to.”
“Do you wish to change your arrival city?”
Charlotte’s words came, as strong as an outbound departure announcement. What if today was a sign? Then Jonah: all I needed to make decisions from there on. Then Jay.
“Where were you headed?”
“No idea. I barely remember climbing out of the car.”
“Like you became a bystander to your life but didn’t care enough to fix the moment.”
“Exactly.”
“Miss?”
Freesia filled her lungs, chased away the stagnant, humid air on an edge of resolve. Peace, maybe. This moment, she would fix.
“Atlanta,” she said. “One way.”
4
Alex
“If you had small hands, this wouldn’t be an issue,” said Alex, peering around Jonah’s muscled bicep to the floorboard in question. In the space beneath a vintage, cast-iron floor grate, past a crack in the duct work, and firmly nested against the original subflooring, sat a colorless, crystalline hunk of carbon in a six-prong Tiffany setting worth more than the collective lien on a hundred bridal shops.
“If I had small hands, last night wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.” He smiled over his shoulder, dimple tucked at his sleeve, gaze heated.
In a rush of hormone-fueled fantasies, she was on her knees in a different scenario. Nights when Charlotte kept Maddie, the same nights without Ibby in Jonah’s house, invited all manner of grasping and indulgent expeditions to make up for the lost years when Jonah had been married to Katherine and Alex had Michael.
Or not.
Truth was, Alex never really had Michael. She had married the version of him he had wanted her to see. She had learned that was the whole of marriage: an exercise in two versions or a person.
She nudged Jonah’s shoulder. Though she had replaced his hand with hers, Jonah was a thief, robbing her of a kiss, ambivalent to the gravity of the task at hand. If the Scott family filed an insurance claim against Match Made in Devon, the business would slide faster than a strapless bridesmaid dress during a bouquet nosedive.
He aimed his penlight into the cavernous space. “I’ll remove a few of the floorboards.”
The tip of her middle finger swiped cold metal.
“I’m almost there,” she said, too loud, her voice riding a crest of excitement.
“Get a room,” said Bernice, on her way to placing Maddie’s baby stroller in the office. She had returned Maddie after their customary morning walk in which the woman gave the infant advice on everything from savings bonds to tattooed men.
Per usual, Jonah partook in the fruitcake Bernice dished up. He never failed to eat up her figs of humor with a laugh.
Alex rolled her eyes. As grateful as Alex was to her mother’s Silver Swarm, the gray-haired stalwart women who rarely flinched in the face of adversity and never hesitated to insinuate themselves into town business, there were days when she was certain she couldn’t take another minute crowded by so many opinions. Then right about that time, Taffy would bring decadent treats that caused customers to linger and purchase or Hazel would chat up a bride-to-be who would rather be in a deer blind than slipping on a ball gown and remind Alex that the sisterhood her mother had with these women, the rapport Charlotte had with nearly all women, was largely a void in her life. If she wanted Maddie to grow up differently, less prone to punishing herself in her quest for perfection, Alex would do well to smothe
r her own isolation tendencies.
Alex rededicated herself to the quest for the ring. “Got any gum?”
“Charlotte offered me a piece from one of the drawers behind the counter.”
Perfect. Nothing said responsive bridal attendant like a sticky strip of juicy fruit. While Jonah rummaged the drawers, Alex fished a pencil out of a nearby cup. When they’d fashioned an extension of her fingertip with a sticky blob of cinnamon and Jonah’s spit on the eraser end of the pencil, Alex gave retrieval another attempt before she relented to a full-on floor excavation during business hours.
This time, she heard the whisper-soft scrape of metal against metal.
“More light,” she said.
Jonah readjusted his flashlight. Its beam bounced clearly off of one of the diamond’s facets, no longer hidden. Alex dropped the pencil and reached her hand deeper into the duct. Cold metal brushed her fingertips. She clenched the ring in her fist, gum and all, and pulled her arm free.
A whistle slipped through Jonah’s lips. “God, will you look at the size of that thing?”
On her way back out of the office, Bernice muttered, “No one likes a braggart, Mr. Dufort.”
Again, Jonah bit that fig. He rolled over on his back, chuckled, and basked in the glory of not having to fetch his tools and tear up his handiwork. Alex cleared off the gum and held up the ring to inspect it for nicks or scrapes that might warrant an insurance claim.
“Put it on,” said Jonah.
“Are you kidding?” Alex glanced around. Bernice was a mouthpiece in screen print t-shirts and polyester pants. Everyone in Devon would know by sundown.
“What’s the harm?”
“It’s entirely unprofessional. And given what happened, it seems like bad luck.”
Jonah blinked. Like a spec of bullshit dust had fallen into his eyes. “The woman who always carries an umbrella and schedules flossing in her day planner buys into superstition?”
She frowned and slipped the ring into her pocket.
“Wait a minute. Are you…”
Alex decided that was as good a time as any to stand and be done with all this nonsense. The moment blood circulated back through her legs, she headed straight for the ladies’ room, tossed the used gum, and washed her hands. General repairs weren’t the only thing Jonah was passionate about nailing down. He was her shadow the moment she exited the restroom.
“Alex?”
She turned on a sparkle that rivaled the diamond in her slacks. “Hmm?”
He had known her long enough to know that nothing made Alex sparkle like a diamond, She had to reign it in. An exercise in two versions.
Was it hot in the shop? Alex shed her cardigan on her way to the office. Women trying on twenty pounds of charmeuse and organza needed a steady blast of cool air. She unlocked her phone, pulled up the app that gave her instant access to the thermostat, and tapped down the air conditioning well past the blue snowflake icon.
“Are you having second thoughts about marriage?” asked Jonah when they were alone.
She gave her best as-if face then matched it to a vigorous shaking of her head. Nope. Negative. Jonah was a dream. Her dream. Always had been. Why would someone run from a dream?
“You proposed to me, remember?”
God, he was adorable. More joking, chest-thumping ego than upset. His version.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Why are we even talking about this?”
Jonah reached for her day planner and handed it to her. “Prove it. Pick a date.”
Alex pushed out a smile. “I’ve been wanting to drive out to the winery in Natchez.”
“Not a date. The date.”
She found it increasingly harder to keep her disposition in check. Her cheeks ached from the effort. After a meticulous reorienting of her journal, a delicate brush to remove eraser crumbles left over from her morning stress bomb related to quarterly taxes, a polite clearing of her throat, and considerable effort locating the present calendar month, she reached for the pencil cup on her desk: a visually-Zen spiral of uniform number two leads with mint-condition erasers. A gift from Charlotte. If only they hadn’t been foil-embossed with the phrase stay classy, bitch, an @ sign replacing the i because Charlotte didn’t curse.
Jonah pulled a pen from his pocket. Used to mark off things like PVC pipes and band saw cut lines. Fine tip. Black. Permanent. “With this.”
Alex’s heart did a lopsided jig. Correction aids of any type—tape or liquid—were the tools of knuckle-dragging impulsives, present company and PVC pipes excluded, of course. A little pre-planning could wipe out the vast majority of life’s mistakes before they happened.
She swallowed, hard enough to give her ears a robust pop, and accepted the pen. The current month’s grid seemed crowded. She flipped ahead. Her gaze met his.
His brows lifted.
God, he was adorable. Less so now that he had put a permanent pen in her hand, but she loved him. So why did her stomach feel like she’d polished off an entire ginger vegan wedding cake?
Again, she flipped the page. Nine to twelve weeks. Totally reasonable. Anything more than that, there’d be words. And it wasn’t as if she could blame the amount of time needed to procure a dress. She needed a little more time until she had motherhood all figured out. Then she’d be ready. At the final day of the month, a Saturday, eight o’clock in the evening, Alex wrote Marry Jonah. For good measure, she went against her journal rule of shapes originating from stickers, stamps, or other outcome-predictive embellishments, and drew a crooked heart around the words.
Ugh. So Charlotte of her.
Jonah’s eyes tightened like she was still a riddle he hadn’t yet solved.
Alex placed the planner on her desk and patted the outside of her pocket. “I should really get to the bank before Margaret goes on her lunch break. The safety deposit box seems like the best place for this ring until I can return it to the Scott family.”
On her way out of the office, she grabbed her purse and gave Jonah a peck on the cheek.
He stared at the floor as if she had extracted something other than a ring, something deeper, from the morning.
In the space beneath her ribs, past the crack Michael had created, and firmly nestled against the origins of Alex and Jonah’s love affair, her heart felt like a colorless, crystalline hunk of carbon. She would make it right; she would become the woman he deserved.
5
Freesia
The porch light was out.
At dusk, the half-blue half-brown shack raised up on its poor-man stilts and hobbled back against an outcropping of rock, nearly invisible to passing vessels or wandering bodies. Light-off was a state Mama believed would protect Freesia from things that might mean harm to a girl too young to be alone. Mama hadn’t counted on those things coming from within.
Now, the bulb hung like a claw of broken glass, its corkscrew base rusted as if it had been taken out as far back as Hurricane Irma and never replaced. Seven steps, grayed like driftwood beneath a broken railing, did their best to say up here, child, I promise a view unlike any other at high tide, just like old times, but too often echoed the boot soles of men come sniffing around when the sun dropped behind, toward the continent.
Freesia dropped her shoes in the sand. From inside, the gritty vocals of Otis Redding bled and twisted on the sea breeze lifting the curtains. The music moved through her limbs, and she nearly wept. Because her mother loved this music. Because she loved it, too. Because she was there, toes burrowing in the sand, in a place that the furthest reaches of the world couldn’t erase.
The wind brought something else too. The decay of sickness. It filled her nostrils and closed her throat. Medicines sweat out, skin dying ahead of the body, sour breath, the alcohol and plastics and tools of the infirmed, vague yet distinct.
She ascended the steps and knocked.
Otis quieted his lover’s prayer, begging his lover to come on home.
Minutes stretched.
“Mama, it
’s Free. I know you’re in there. You turned down Otis.”
She tried the door. The handle turned easily.
The shack was just one room constructed around a skinny, cast-iron stove capable of belching wood smoke out the roof’s center, that now stood cold. Barely enough room for a loose-spring cot and mattress, a chair, and a haphazard kitchen cobbled out of junkyard parts. Frayed rugs shared the floor with the beach, sand everywhere. All available surfaces, even the raw structural crossbeams, held litter: take-out containers, sand flies buzzing around open cans, stacks of unopened mail, pill bottles, mugs with old coffee, sprung vermin traps, the same dust-catching talismans Camille Day had always prized.
Her mother sat askew on a naked mattress, as if she had attempted to move, answer the door, but the elements had blown her off-course. She wore her hair cropped close. Gray crowded out her curls, the white surrounding her irises, the thin skin beneath her eyes. Illness had turned her to sea glass—rounded, tossed, broken.
The stench of urine cloyed Freesia’s airways. She propped the door open with a nearby lantern.
Camille had yet to say anything.
“How are you, Mama?”
“That what I am now?” Her words were a slow boil that never rolled. What she lacked in strength she made up for in her stripping stare.
“Doctor called me. Said you can’t live here anymore.” Freesia spoke too loudly, like the old woman’s mind and hearing had stumbled into the abyss along with her desire to care.
“What do they know?”
“A great deal more than you.” Freesia reached for the radio, clicked off the heavy sound that had become intrusive.
“I got us a motel room up the way. Or we could drive, make good time.”
Her mother regarded her with a blank stare.
“Collect your things, Mama.” Freesia took a good look around the shack. “We won’t be back to this godforsaken place.”
“I want to die.”
“Well, you won’t be doing it here.”
Freesia walked the space, four steps in any direction, no more. Her gaze traveled along trinkets she remembered, some she didn’t. On the beach wall, a handful of nails affixed a small cluster of photographs. Her stomach tightened at images of her mother’s old boyfriends: Carl with the horseshoe mustache and bell-bottoms and chapped lips that scraped her skin like a parasite; Tennyson with the fastest backhand and the slowest mind. Other photos brought an odd warmth. Familiarity, nothing more. Camille’s grandmother in an apron and hair rag on a North Carolina boarding school porch, black and white, in more ways than one. Freesia at two, bare ass in the sand, smiling, the only picture she ever saw of herself as a child. The last photo was her mother dressed in white shoes and finery standing beside two strangers.
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 5