The sun’s final rays through stained glass in the cupola dappled shards of color over the blooms-in-waiting. Humid, loamy air tucked her bare arms, a welcome closeness from the onset of chill beyond the glass. Three wooden gardening tables ran the length of the space—modest, considering the grounds upon which the greenhouse stood. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine why Jay had brought her here.
He captured her hand and led her as if he knew precisely where they were going in a sea of leafy blossoms. His touch was warm, pushed aside the chill. In front of a spray of familiar, trumpet-like blooms, he stopped.
Freesias.
“What’s this?”
“I had them ordered the day you left for New York. I wanted to have a place to go when I wanted to remember shoes and monks and naked men in a river.”
A bubble of laughter trickled past her lips.
“I told our gardener that only the rarest would do,” he said. “They came yesterday, from a nursery in the Netherlands. For a donation, they allowed me to name their new variation.”
The flowers’ blues ran a gradient from nearly gray to lavender, the hybrid so unique it looked as if it had been blended by an artist’s touch. She pressed her nose to the velvety petals. The citrusy baby powder scent blanketed her senses, erased the loss and anger and instincts of the day, made her feel attached to something, someone.
“What did you name it?”
“Rainy Day,” he said. “For the day we met. And for you, Miss Freesia Day.”
She inhaled, deeply, to remind herself she was alive, awake. Her lungs felt coated in pollen, something sticky that kept her from breathing past the pure, trembling ache that opened in her chest. Tears were off limits, so she swallowed them, deflected.
“You’re one crazy-ass rich guy.”
His turn to laugh.
But he knew. He must have known, because her voice had left her and as he sobered from her words, he looked at her as if she was the real he had searched for so desperately.
Her bare toes curled against the dirt floor.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He reached for a set of gardener shears.
“No,” she said, too anxious, too strangled with emotion. She pressed his hand until the tool was back on the table. “Keep them intact.”
The flowers. Her heart.
He pinched off one bloom on a crowded stem and placed it in her palm. And when she thought he might push too much, too soon, forget that she vowed she would never trust him and kiss her again, he reached behind her for a windbreaker hanging on a peg and placed it around her bare shoulders.
They walked to the gate, his hand protective around hers, a comfortable silence at dusk. Hardly the autonomous exit she had planned. Jameson Scott played the yielding, dutiful son, but if there was one thing that her mother had taught her, it was that men could not be trusted. They leave. They inflict hurt. And their past always becomes their future. She had only to look to Elias March to confirm that truth. If Freesia wanted to come out of the other side of her mother’s death and the remainder of her days in Devon, senses and good sense intact, Jay would have to stay a crazy-ass rich guy she’d once met on a highway.
8
Alex
The night was already surreal. A feast crowding the kitchen table where her father’s whiskey rings were still visible in the grain, bodies crowded elbow to elbow in mismatched chairs and plates because years and children had not been kind to Stella Irene’s dinnerware, and an inordinate amount of baby talk directed toward Maddie because silence squirmed and no one wanted to speak of the elephant in the room.
Mistresses didn’t exactly incite ravenous appetites.
But after the plates were cleared and the dishwasher loaded, Charlotte’s kids scattered to play outside with friends, and Maddie and Camille were asleep for the night, Charlotte came up with a doosey of an idea that prolonged the awkward and took the night from surreal to screwball: a pail of flashlights and a made-up story about how the holes in the trailer roof had been punched out like a constellation and every first day of summer, it was tradition for the March children to go out and take a good look.
“It’s past time for Freesia to be brought into the fold,” declared Charlotte.
Nash looked at her and simply shook his head, pulled two beers from the fridge, and asked Jonah to join him in the garage.
Halfway across the back field, Alex couldn’t hold it any longer.
“Charlotte, what the hell are we doing out here?”
She let out an urgent plea to shush. “I don’t want Nash following us.”
“You could stock this RV with pole dancers and whiskey and he still wouldn’t follow us. Probably a den for copperheads by now.”
“What?” Freesia’s light beam went berserk and thudded in the dirt. She turned back to the house. “I should check on Camille.”
Charlotte picked up the dropped flashlight, looped her arm around Freesia’s elbow, and rerouted her in the direction of the trailer. “I was out here the other day. There’s nothing hiding in that trailer but answers.”
“To what?” Alex’s voice hedged suspicious.
“Remember what you told me about seeing Mama out here?”
“Charlotte…”
“I had to find out for myself.”
“Find out what?” said Freesia. “Who’s going to tell me what’s going on here?”
It was too much—three flashlight beams when there should only be two, the memory of their father’s light crossing the same field the night before he drove away, Camille Day here, in Alex’s lifetime, Freesia poking after Stella Irene’s secrets when her existence had been the biggest secret of all.
“Alex believes our mother was having an affair out here.”
Alex’s mood snapped, rubber-band style. “Fuck, Charlotte. Just lay it all out there.” She outpaced the others, needing distance, but added, “And I don’t think. I know.”
Freesia asked, “When?”
“The weeks leading up to Daddy leaving.”
“You think that’s why he left?” asked Freesia.
Alex came up short. “I don’t know, sis. Maybe your dear old mom can shed some light on that while she’s inside, sleeping on our parent’s mattress.”
This stirred Charlotte’s voice to hornet. Like running into a nest in darkness.
“You know that old bed was the best one to relocate to the sewing room.”
“She could have kept her rich boyfriend’s booty offering.”
“Alex!”
Freesia clicked off her light and stalked close, barely more than a suggestion in the dark. Her perfume eclipsed the smell of dirt. She was still, stoic, nothing to indicate Alex had ruffled a nerve but her acidic tone. “Wouldn’t be all that much different than stringing a man along for babysitting, would it?”
Pressure mounted behind Alex’s eyes. The urge to lunge was powerful. Take her to the dirt until she backtracked on how alike they were. But Alex refused to give her the satisfaction of coming off as the one with all the reason, all the control.
Charlotte jockeyed between them. “Both of you, stop. No one said this was going to be easy. Family never is. We have to make do with the cards we were dealt.”
Alex pressed her fingertips to her temples and rubbed out the riding tension. “Yeah, well between us all, we have a full house of adulterers.”
Herself included.
Charlotte folded. “I’m not convinced of any of them.”
“You think you’re the only one who’s come out here trying to find evidence?” said Alex. “I looked, Char. There’s nothing.”
Charlotte handed Alex a folded paper from her pocket. “I found this.”
Alex aimed her light at the print. “Big Auntie’s Chicken and Waffles and Soul Eatery?”
“It was inside the oven, beneath the cigarette lighter Mama wanted to hide,” said Charlotte. “Look at the date.”
8-22-88.
Alex shrugged. “So someone ac
cepted a delivery for pre-battered drumsticks. This proves nothing.”
“The initials at the bottom say C-G.”
“Who’s C-G?”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Charlotte. “So I asked around.”
Of course she did.
Freesia had turned on her flashlight, drifted away. Alex found she could breathe, even if it was dirt.
“I made a list of names—everyone who lived in Devon for the past forty years with those initials. Then I went to see Big Auntie’s son down at the assembly plant in Marthasville to see if he recognized any of the names as having done business with his Mama. One name came up, twice.”
“Who?” asked Alex.
“Age thirty-six, two years Mama’s junior. Always had an affinity for her. An investor in the chicken eatery back in 1988.”
Charlotte knew Alex’s appetite for puzzles, but this was neither the time nor the place. Alex’s fuse had already burned to a nib. Her brain clicked forward to an office with a polished mahogany desk, a publicity photo among law books, stray threads from a blazer’s cuff. C-G.
“Clement Grant.”
Charlotte added, “Esquire,” in the breathy way the lawyer did when introducing himself to new people, a favorite joke among locals. From force of habit or a place of irony, Alex couldn’t say.
At this development, Freesia awakened from her void. “The lawyer?”
Her question waffled between surprise and disgust at the suggestion of Stella Irene’s likely hookup. The fact that Alex had once believed the young lawyer handsome prickled her defenses. He had been overly friendly with Alex and Charlotte back then. Her brain clicked forward again—or maybe it was back—to the figure she had seen at the other end of the pipe as an inquisitive eight-year old, to this new possibility. Could the snatched memory of a young man’s penis she had seen back then match with the elderly lawyer she knew now? She seemed unable to stop the progression—to how it must have fared with time. Mostly, it all just made her shrimp and grits stage a revisit.
“One and the same,” said Charlotte.
They stood in a no-man’s land, equidistant from the house and the trailer. The night chill wiggled up right next to Alex’s bones. She hadn’t planned on the escapade being so involved. Or so gut-churning. Her last bit of patience rallied to keep her stomach settled.
“What’s the plan here, Charlotte?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We ask him if he ever delivered chicken out here to Mama.”
Alex and Freesia shared a gaze.
Charlotte’s punchline never came.
“You’re serious,” said Alex.
“Why else would he be out here?” Charlotte said. Maybe she waited for a punchline too. Eventually, her expression twisted and dawn replaced whatever the hell dimness was going on inside her mind. “Oh….ooooh.” And a final, disgusted, “Ohh.”
Alex shook her head.
“Well, didn’t you get a good look?”
“I saw his junk through a hole in the wall, Char. No, I couldn’t pick it out of a lineup.” In all earnest, she did remember one detail. “His hair—down there—was dark.”
“Well,” said Freesia, her tone flat, “that rules out all the Irishmen in Devon.”
Freesia was getting as dicey as Alex. Another thing they shared—impatience for bullshit.
“Still doesn’t explain what we’re doing out here.”
“I couldn’t smuggle a stack of letters out last time,” said Charlotte. “Nash wants no part of this, but I didn’t want to come back alone.”
“What letters?” asked Alex.
“I saw them in the glove box. Mama’s handwriting. Stamped but never mailed. To someone named Millie.” Charlotte looked at Freesia. “Georgia postal code.”
Millie. Camille.
Stella Irene and Camille had been friends.
Freesia turned away. Not before Alex saw her expression.
She already knew.
9
Stella Irene
Millie,
I didn’t know you’d settled with your aunt in Savannah until now. Elias never was good at keeping secrets, least of all the events of last summer. I understand why you didn’t tell me. I know I can be a bit much, get carried away. Elias says it comes from all those movies I sneak out to see. Sometimes he makes me crazy with want and it clouds everything. Even all that you mean to me.
When I saw you, that day your Daddy had his way, I had come to surprise you, tell you all about Memphis and the old asylum outside of town that we explored and the day the fog rolled in and we had a picnic on the highest bridge we could find. But that day I crouched beneath your porch, I was so scared. What he did to you, well, it’s unforgiveable, and I hope he rots in Hell.
But I couldn’t say anything.
I tried. Mama would have done something. She always did have the loudest mouth in the county when it came to matters of wrong, but telling would have changed everything. Your Daddy was taking you north and I was staying and when it came to Elias, that was all I could think about. He always did have a soft spot for you.
I know that you went driving with him and that he kissed you. And I know you love him, same as me, and that neither of us could claim him first because we were both there, under that oak tree, when we saw him all those years ago. Maybe someday you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
I’ll think of you when we go to the beach. Elias says you can see the sunrise from where you are now.
Your friend,
Stellie
10
Charlotte
Sometimes, when Charlotte stood at the shop’s front windows, where she could get her nose right up against the glass and see a sliver of the town square and the white cups of magnolia blooms stretching and crowding the hundred-year-old trees, she surrendered to the temptation to squint her lashes. The scene blurred like those soft-focus images of Audrey Hepburn in the wedding scene of Funny Face, the way Devon would have appeared back before her mother flicked used cigarette butts into the field and had an affair with a married lawyer in a trailer and failed her best friend in the name of love.
Charlotte wanted the truths to be a dream sequence.
After they read Stella Irene’s first unsent letter to Camille, Charlotte, Alex, and Freesia decided that the remaining letters should have restrictions: time between because a body could only take so many revelations at once; read in Charlotte’s voice because its lilty drawl came closest to getting truths straight from the horse’s mouth, truths that burned Charlotte up because she had sat beside the women in the shop nearly every day for over a decade and her mother had never thought once to tell her that her life had been anything less than perfect; and lastly, the letters were only to be read when the three of them were together.
Charlotte hadn’t trusted herself with the temptation so Alex set the remaining envelopes back in the glove box and put the dangly key in her pocket.
The business day had been slow. On days when Alex didn’t come into the shop right away, Charlotte didn’t mind the emptiness to turn up her sappy playlist, nibble on the latest offerings that the cake vendor in Marthasville had brought in, or reorganize the gowns based on a whim. Charlotte usually had an entire kettle on her stove in the way of warm, emotional support. Today, however, she had been steamed dry.
Around lunchtime, Natalie and Allison blew into the shop faster than blistering gossip. They had their cell phones primed and talked over each other.
“Oh. My. God. Mom,” said Natalie. “The video is everywhere—”
“You’ve gone viral, but not in a good way.” said Allison.
Charlotte focused on the screens. Same grainy video, different spot. She tilted her head at Natalie’s screen and caught sight of a woman standing among big, bushy white things. No…not things, dresses. The screeching words on the audio—“You did not just say that…Let’s not…Let’s do this publicly…”—unscrambled Charlotte’s confusion.
Peyton Habersham.
O
of, and there was Freesia’s Jaybird. Even pissed off, he was a Gosling.
“Let’s talk about how much of a limp dick you were last night!”
Charlotte’s heart vaulted her throat. She scrambled to grab Natalie’s phone and tap the video to pause.
Natalie rolled her eyes.
Allison said, “Guess you don’t want to hear the f-bomb part then.”
“No. Once was enough.”
“As evidenced by second forty-three when the camera panned past Mom’s advanced o-mouth,” said Natalie. “At least ten of the comments were about your reaction.”
The video’s title read like a tabloid headline: GIRL DUMPED AT BRIDAL SHOP; RICH FIANCÉ CHASES AFTER EMPLOYEE.
Alex would go volcanic.
“Maybe they won’t know it happened here,” said Charlotte.
“Says so in the description.” Natalie took her phone back and scrolled down for Charlotte to get a good view.
Sure enough. Bridal store in Devon, Mississippi.
Absolutely Vesuvius. Charlotte pictured the sketch in Alex’s journal.
“Can we have it taken down?”
Allison said, “We can try, but bad publicity isn’t usually a reason.”
Charlotte paced, then landed in the bawlin’ and stonewallin’ chair. Seriously considered doing both. “I’ll bet it was that Carol Lamar’s daughter—the one who wears the Pink Floyd tank tops and never met a razor she liked. They were in here looking for mother-of-the-bride dresses that day for her sister’s wedding. I’ll see what Bernice can dig up on that one.”
“Blackmail, Mom?”
“In the South, it’s called a mutual understanding.”
Her daughters set down their bags and perched on the edge of the raised bridal platform, chins against palms.
“Landon Pearce says bad publicity made him,” said Natalie. “He just knew what to do with it.”
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 9