No. Not strangers, exactly.
Freesia leaned closer to the photo of three. The light was shot. She barely made out the white folks but the man had a slight cleft chin like Alex and wide-set eyes, something Freesia had always disliked about her features.
Elias March.
Tears she had bottled on the beach rolled in, high tide. She swallowed them back, told herself this trip wasn’t about feeling sorry for anyone, least of all herself. The other woman in the photo? Well, Freesia’s eyes adjusted and she saw it—the youthful face of the same woman who had come here the summer before her death, the same one who favored Charlotte. Stella Irene. The three looked happy, close, inseparable.
Definitive proof that Elias’s trip to Georgia wasn’t random.
Jesus.
Freesia removed the nail, pocketed the photograph. She couldn’t say why, exactly. Lord knew this shack held more than its share of secrets. Didn’t seem right leaving that kind of friendship to the elements.
“Where then?” Camille insisted.
“Mississippi.” Freesia could hardly say home. Didn’t know the meaning of the word.
“Never.”
“They’re dead, Mama. Old haunts can’t hurt you. Least that’s what some believe.” Jonah had sure seemed convinced. “Once you’re gone? That’s anyone’s guess.”
Freesia crouched at the bedside, for the suitcase she knew would be there, and pulled it out. At six, she had tried to hide inside it. Her kinky hair stuck out of the brass seams. A game of hide and seek in a one-room shack where she was always found. She started with the closest pill bottles, reading labels, checking for the name of the doctor who had called her.
Footfalls sounded against the steps. “Woo-hooooo,” came the call. Freesia remembered Mama’s neighbor to be the kind to impersonate a bird to try and sound friendly. “I thought I heard voices on my evening walk.”
She was middle-aged, of Hispanic descent, pearl buttons on her cashmere sweater. A woman who might take her beach stroll with a glass of wine in one hand and a Pomeranian in the other. So diametric from Camille Day, Freesia couldn’t help but think their acquaintance was merely a circumstance of geography.
“I’m Freesia, Camille’s daughter.”
“That’s what you are now?” Camille groused.
The visitor plastered on a smile, somewhere between amusement and sympathy. “I remember. We met a few years back. I’m Estelle.”
“Thank you for looking in on her.”
“Gave me such a fright last week when I saw her laying half out on the porch. I usually pop in after both my walks, morning and night. She must have fallen after I’d come to check on her. Laid there all day, didn’t you, Camille?” Estelle’s attempt to broaden the conversation’s scope. Freesia supposed it was best not to talk about the dying as if they were already gone.
Freesia pictured her mother baking in the sun, sand fleas eating her exposed skin, her voice hoarse from unheard shouts. The scene felt like the tide and the sand, chest-high, compressing the air in her lungs, all at once.
“I was fine,” said Camille. “Just getting my sun.”
Estelle shared a look with Freesia, eyes wide, head shaking, as if to say lies, all of it.
“At any rate, Tom and I are glad you’re here. We weren’t sure what was going to happen to her once the developer finalized the paperwork. These things move so fast, you know.”
“Developer?”
“Putting in a resort. Specializing in weddings, I think. Let them assume all the risk, is what Tom says. He’s getting too old to fret about every weather system off of the African coast that thinks about squeezing out a raindrop. This protected coast doesn’t feel so protected when it’s 100 years overdue for a massive hurricane.”
Freesia turned to her mother. “Mama, did you get paperwork from a developer?”
“Oh, she wouldn’t have,” said Estelle. “Our property line extends to the sand bar.”
“So…this building…?”
“Was a caretaker’s place when we purchased the property. Seemed only right to continue with Camille here.”
“When was this?”
“When was it, Camille? ’Bout ten years now, I’d say.”
Freesia felt as though she was being buried in a sand dune, the pressure in her chest the worst of it. She lowered herself to the chair and stared at her momma until she thought she could will the truth out of her. Camille stared off, empty; maybe she no longer knew truth from lies.
“She always told me this place belonged to her, to us. She hung curtains with tassels and said we were the queens of our sandy kingdom, as rich as the ancient pharaohs because not everyone lives where they can wake up to salt on their skin. ’Course I knew that wasn’t so, but still…”
Freesia spoke to her, about her, the words punching from her throat, caustic, bitter. Still the old woman removed herself from Freesia’s hurt, as she always had.
Stoic. God Almighty, Freesia saw it now. Alex’s word. Freesia pressed a fist to her lips. Her fingertips absorbed the heat. She had spent a lifetime running from the woman before her only to find bits of her inside.
She turned to Estelle. “Forgive me if you get a call from a realtor. I had hoped it would help with her care.”
Estelle gave her a smile, all sweetness and charity. “Tom and I would like to help.”
Help, they had. A decade of free room and board. Meals and care when Camille could no longer work, when she had run off the last of her men who might have provided companionship. The last known to Freesia had been Rodney, a veteran with a pension. Far from a peach, but a woman like Camille didn’t always have choices.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Freesia. “But thank you.”
Estelle helped Freesia pack her mother’s things. When they asked questions of her, Camille said nothing. Estelle wrapped a few trinkets in clothing, seemed to know the stories behind them, so that Camille might find comfort in them. Freesia felt detached, like a kite suspended on a stiff breeze, fastened only by a thread. Once, when she picked up a small snow globe with buildings inside, she thought of New York, but the dust on the outside and the snow inside masked the scene.
“That was her favorite,” said Estelle. “I asked her many times about it—it was so unique. She never said why.”
Freesia wiped the dust clear with her hand and shook it so that the flakes settled evenly. Instead of one iconic skyline—Seattle, Chicago, even Atlanta—some of the most extraordinary structures from around the globe: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, the Empire State building, the Giza Pyramids. At the base, the words LFI Financial.
Freesia glanced up from the globe. Her mother watched her.
“You gonna tell me the story, Mama?”
Camille’s attention drifted away.
A flush crept up Freesia’s cheeks. It was one thing to let their estrangement hang all out in private. It was quite another to be seen as the one with the youth and the strength and the means who had simply abandoned a loved one to meager resources.
“She has her good days too,” said Estelle.
An aside meant to lift the cloak of guilt. Shift the burden to a most impossible women. Surely Estelle would have seen it—Camille’s stubborn intolerance, her judgment, her tendency to lie even when the situation didn’t warrant it, her inability to do the right thing, time and again.
When they had completed packing, distilling a woman’s past to what could fit in the contents of a suitcase slightly bigger than the transistor radio inside—the only thing beyond the snow globe Camille insisted they bring—Estelle said her goodbyes. There were no tears, barely a hug, as if Estelle, too, had tried and given up long ago. Her warmest goodbye was for Freesia.
“You take good care.”
A warning more than anything. Mind yourself lest you become her was how Freesia took it.
Estelle wrapped her sweater ends tight around her, protection from the night breeze that had kicked up the curtains as if it also
desired a say. Leave here, woman. You’ve done enough. Estelle gave a final wave and descended the steps into the darkness.
Freesia wanted to do the same. With Estelle present to fill the gaps between Camille and Freesia, she had gone a good few minutes without thinking about trading the promise of New York, the lights of Broadway, for the lone lantern that pushed back darker memories. In the wake of silence and manners, the bitterness crashed back into Freesia like breakers against the pier. She tugged Camille’s suitcase off the mattress, but it didn’t break free. Blankets swarmed, choked the broken wheels. Freesia cursed and wrestled the bag as if it was her towline back to shore, a purpose to give her movement so she didn’t climb back into her rental car and head straight for the airport, leaving her mother behind. She almost took a tumble backward as she wrenched it off the bed, and although she had won the battle, the toxic sting in her extremities, the unruly slip of the band at her hair, her breathlessness at the mundane act made her realize her internal war had only just begun.
“How’s your walking?” Freesia snapped. She gathered herself and her foul mood and activated the flashlight app on her phone.
“’Bout as good as your forgettin’, child.”
Freesia helped her mother down the steps, told her to hang on to the piece of the rail still solid. She didn’t know why she went back to close the door. Wouldn’t matter anyway. Seemed fitting the ocean should claim the shack before some developer. The suitcase in her hand felt like nothing, was nothing. The sum total of a life lived outside of love.
Charlotte would have romanticized the moment. Would have gone on about how the waves kiss the sand and of all the shells along the shoreline, Freesia was chosen to be Camille’s and how could love not exist there? Alex was right. This wasn’t a plot twist in one of the novels Charlotte loved so much. The tale of this mother and daughter was a straight up tragedy: sorrow, weakness of character, inability to cope with extreme circumstances, a fall from riches that never were inside a kingdom built on sand.
And that was just Freesia.
In the end, when there was dust, she hoped the downfall wouldn’t be hers.
6
Charlotte
Nash was a man of common sense. Charlotte knew that if she was to appeal to the salt-of-the-earth side of him, she had to come up with a better excuse to rummage around inside the old trailer at the edge of Mama and Daddy’s field than looking for evidence of her mother’s infidelity. Nash would have had no part in that. He had loved Stella Irene with an unflinching quality that made Charlotte love him all the more.
No, Alex was wrong. Mama was faithful to Daddy, and Charlotte aimed to prove it.
Nash patted the trailer’s fiberglass shell. Knee-deep in weeds and neck-down in sweat, he had given the twenty-foot monstrosity’s exterior a good once-over: copper piping, junction box for the electrical system, battery cables, propane tank lines, brake plugs.
“Well?” Charlotte said. “What do you think?”
“If you want me to improve this so we can take family trips, the only way…”
“Yeah?
“Is with gasoline and a match.”
Charlotte scowled. She hadn’t known how much she wanted the trailer to have a happy ending—on both counts—until that moment.
“Char, this has been neglected for so long, it’d take more in replacement parts than the danged thing is worth, not to mention time.”
“But you’ve barely seen the inside. Really seen it. Come here, I’ll show you.” She took his hand and dragged him through the door and up two steps. “Look past the wood rot and the holes to the possibilities. Imagine a vintage license plate on the back, the interior all gussied up, every man in town wanting to take a peek to see what you’ve done with the old thing.”
It wasn’t as if Charlotte was lying. The idea of a travel trailer to recapture the magic her family had felt on their two-week jaunt to the Canadian border tapped into her romantic side. The only thing that would have made their life-changing trip better was to leave behind the endless string of motel reservations for a place of their own, a chance to park in the wilds, to see their children’s faces lit by campfire light, not screen light, to meet a crossroads and make directional decisions on a whim. But Charlotte did not yet allow herself the dream. She refused to create family memories in a space where others may have been destroyed.
Charlotte went full-on used camper saleswoman. “The kitchen table converts to a sleeping area for a small person—Gabe would love it—and the fridge is adorable. It has a blue and yellow interior…”
She yanked open the handle. A putrid stench wafted out on the already-stale air. Something dark and furry occupied the lightless space. Charlotte closed the door.
“Maybe a new fridge would be best.”
She would not be deterred, despite Nash giving her that once-over look that he got when money people started talking high finance. Or when he believed his better half was out of her ever-living mind. Charlotte kept her tone lively and wistful.
“The cabinetry is intact, just needs a fresh coat of paint, and the privacy screen is…” She accordioned out the screen and detached their hold magnets. In the process, she spotted the queen bed, formed from two bench couches where she and Alex had played raucous games of King of the Couch, each trying to fling the other onto the floor and scrabble up to claim the earth-toned floral upholstered throne. Their laughter had swelled until Daddy fussed on them to pipe down. Her voice tripped up here, staring at a used bed, yellowed sheets and blankets she hadn’t seen in decades and imprints in the pillows. “…immaculate, never used.”
“Char?”
Nash opened a window. He lingered on the scraps of fresh air, then straightened to full height, bumped his head, and winced. Ever her soldier, he sallied forth with what she knew was coming.
“Char, I have known you since this god-awful wood paneling was fashionable. I know when you’re bullshitting me. Why are we really here?”
She wanted to sit, not on the bed. The edge of the ugly brown shower provided a calf-high lip wide enough for a short perch. As soon as she sat, tears gathered behind her eyes.
“Alex told me Mama had an affair out here.” Her throat picked that moment to shutter up. Everything behind came out in a whisper. “I guess I thought if I came out here, I could prove it didn’t happen.”
Nash didn’t move for a long stretch. His chest rose and fell, his eyes planted somewhere near Charlotte’s shoulder as if he were trying to remember, realign his memories, find something to say to a naïve wife he was always trying to protect. When he did move in the cramped space, he sampled ways to be close to her until he ultimately decided crouching on the toe of his boots, eye to eye, was fitting. She let loose of her tears. He always did know her best.
“How does she know?”
“She says she saw them—well, Mama—for a month, maybe more, before Daddy left for Georgia. There’s a pipe that runs through the wall back there to the outside.”
“The same man?”
“She didn’t say.”
“And she’s sure it wasn’t your dad?”
Charlotte leveled a stare at him.
Nash angled his backside against the pocket screen, effectively tucking it back inside the wall between the bedroom and kitchen. “Maybe she thought it was Stella Irene. Kids came out here all the time. Jonah said he and Alex used it at least a dozen times.”
Charlotte loved him for his words, helping her to see other possibilities, vigilantly protecting memories of her mother. She shook her head. “Alex hid. Waited for her to leave so she could be sure.”
“Maybe there’s another explanation. Remember that casino night she threw for your dad when he turned forty-five? Maybe she was coming out here to arrange a surprise party.”
“With her pants down?”
Nash exhaled. His chin dropped to his chest. The revelation was as much a blow to him as it had been to Charlotte. In many ways, Stella Irene and Elias were his blueprint for how to be
an honorable man in this world.
“Truth is, I tried to come out here alone, to look for evidence,” said Charlotte. “Three times, I tried. I never made it past the door.”
Nash tugged her to her feet. His embrace was one of the things Charlotte loved best about him: a wide hand at the nape of her neck, the length of her fitting his front like jigsaw pieces, the right amount of pressure to drop the outside world away, ending on a deep kiss to her scalp.
“Let’s make the fourth time your last. We give it a good search, you let this go. Deal?”
Charlotte nodded.
“Why don’t you start in the kitchen?”
She knew what he was doing. Positioning himself in sleeper area, the place most likely to hold damning discoveries. She didn’t protest. If stormy news was heading in her direction, she’d rather it passed through him. Nash’s slim affinity for conversation had a way of distilling tough talk down to the essentials; and on the soothing rumble of his timbre, the bad always seemed to stay at a safe distance.
Converting the booth area to a mini-sleeper and back again revealed nothing but a population of spiders, holes in the linoleum with chew marks at the edges, a few of Stella Irene’s hidden cigarettes, and Alex’s old Rubik’s cube keychain. In drawers, Charlotte found obsolete maps, an old recipe card for pineapple upside-down cake—which she promptly pocketed—fifty-seven cents in change, ceramic mugs she hadn’t seen since she was a girl, and a first aid kit. She had almost declared the kitchen evidence-free when she opened the oven door. Instead of pans or mini racks, she found a man’s tie and a sheet of paper imprinted with the Big Auntie’s Chicken and Waffles and Soul Eatery logo, dated August 1988, a few months before Daddy’s trip to Georgia. Two blobs of grease transcended the years.
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 6