The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3)

by Danielle Blair

  Charlotte straightened. “We started this together, Alex and Freesia and I. And in a strange way, it’s brought us closer than anything else so far. If there’s a chance we can all finally feel like sisters—be sisters—then I’ll chase the darkness through to its end.”

  “Their end or yours?”

  Nash rose, went back to raking, the same spot, wholly ineffective. After a time, he gave up.

  “You’re not like them, Char. You wear everyone else’s burdens like a raincoat in the blistering sun—one of the things I love most about you. But it is a choice. Your choice, to put it on, to take it off, to leave it behind altogether.”

  “Exactly.” She stood, found her footing. “My choice.”

  “It’s unnecessary.”

  “Until the rains come. And they will come. They always do. Man who works the land should know that better than anyone.” She mustered the energy to draw close, raise up on tippy-toes, plant a kiss on his cheek. Below his ear, she whispered, “There’s still time for that dishwasher.”

  Charlotte gave her best Mae West tease out the barn door. Likely it came off as Jessica Rabbit after she’d taken an over-the-counter sleep aid. Still, it had Nash leaving behind all the unpleasantness and fruitless mucking in favor of lighter things. Namely, a turn on the tractor parked behind the barn under the May stars, raincoat not required.

  23

  Freesia

  Two weeks passed. Paradise and the feelings it evoked seemed like something that had happened to someone else, a distant retelling not unlike Charlotte’s Evangeline story, but one told through a filter of sadness. Freesia tried to label her despondence, the maudlin days, as anything but what they were—a slow march into loss.

  Precisely what kind of loss eluded her.

  Camille’s day nurse, Marie, had assured Freesia that the pendulum swings of patient emotions were normal—contentment to rage to sentimental to cross—all the more exaggerated because, according to Dr. Starnes, Camille had lived most of her life with an undiagnosed mental illness. The realization that perhaps her mother’s choices had not always been that—choices—bled Freesia of some of the energy required to maintain resentment. Did she love her mother? She couldn’t say. How was it possible that for Elias March, a man whom she had not met outside the words of his daughters and his legacy, a man who had abandoned her in favor of his primary life, she had developed a fondness and mourned him, but the mother who had taught her to dig for clams when there was no food and told fanciful stories of sandcastles when there had been no hope, she could not muster anything but detached obligation?

  The pendulum swings of caregiver emotions, usually in the privacy of her space above the repair shop, were equally potent, equally exhausting—and, as Marie had tenderly informed her, equally normal.

  But on the day she had given Marie off, the same Sunday Freesia sent Charlotte and Alex to be with their families because Camille was in rare form—unable to communicate without mumbles turning into shouts, several changes of her sheets and gown, thrown food, and hypersensitivity to touch—Freesia felt broken.

  “Where’s Charlotte?” Camille demanded over the sound of an evangelical minister sweating it out on the television. “Woman’s a saint.”

  “Yeah, well, you got the sinner today.”

  In recent weeks, Freesia had taken to editing her speech. She found her thoughts—especially the bitter ones—were a whack-a-mole game: tamp them down and they popped right back up in a place she didn’t expect. Her designs. Her interactions. Her preoccupations after she and Jay returned to two divergent lives that had no business crossing again.

  On the television, the preacher added his two cents. “You are commanded by Gawd tah forgive-ah.”

  Freesia picked up the remote and muted the volume. “What do you need, Mama?”

  “Charlotte prays with me.”

  Freesia wasn’t sure what to do with her statement. Didn’t know the first thing about it—Charlotte’s impromptu ministry or the challenge inherent in her mother’s tone. “Looks like you got a whole congregation there praying with you. Dial up that number, give him the last of your life savings, maybe God’ll answer.”

  “When did you get so spiteful?” said Camille.

  Freesia gathered the dishes from her mother’s living room tray, tried not to focus on how little she had eaten. Her desire for food has nothing to do with her desire to live, Marie had said. All part of the body saying ‘enough.’ On her way back from the kitchen, Freesia’s fatigue answered for her.

  “Right about the time I learned Sunday school was an excuse for you to get away from me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Back down, Free. Do you want to be right or do you want peace?

  Freesia took to straightening the room—folding blankets, stacking magazines—anything she could to edit, edit, edit.

  “I was in church every Sunday,” Camille pressed.

  Every single one of Freesia’s buttons.

  More lies. Didn’t seem right to get all worked up, didn’t change anything, but she’d be damned if she’d let her mother rewrite history to make her peace. Seemed that real was all they had left between them.

  “No sense denying, Mama. I followed you once.” She kept her voice calm, flat, precise. “All the way to that man’s house. One with the beard and the broken cars in the yard. Least you stuck to your own yard with that one.”

  Her mother’s preference for white men, Freesia once thought, was designed to leave her daughter guessing after her father, searching for herself in every man who circled back. She understood now what most of Camille’s men had in common: they weren’t Elias March, but they could have been. Under the right lighting, at a whisper in the dark, enough liquor in the veins, they could have been.

  “A body needs to get away every now and then,” said Camille. “You’d understand if you were ever a mother.”

  A commentary on her life choices, if ever Freesia had heard one. She grabbed a fresh tissue, scooped all the used ones from the tray, and responded below her breath, “Yeah, well, I could say the same for you.”

  Camille shifted, with some degree of difficulty. “What do you want, child?”

  Cancer hadn’t snatched her mother’s hearing.

  “You drag me with you, away from the ocean, take away dying on my terms, just to punish me each day?”

  Oh, they were in it now. Rewriting history. Freesia stopped her straightening, forgot all about editing, all about peace.

  “Punish? That’s rich, Mama. I put my life on hold for you.”

  “No one asked.”

  “That’s right. Just like no one asked if I wanted to be brought into this world, unwanted, unloved, a constant reminder of all you’d never have, of everything Stella Irene took from you.”

  Despite her compromised strength, Camille managed to shoo Freesia away. “You don’t know…”

  “Then tell me, Mama. The truth this time. Tell me what I don’t know.”

  Camille studied the minister, shouting, scowling, saving. Still silenced.

  “Did Elias know about me?”

  Freesia waited. A full rotation of the second hand on the mantle clock’s face before she settled on the sofa and went back to flipping through the glossy pages of Penri Beauchêne’s latest fashion catalog. Camille stared at nothing, everything, gone again.

  Until she wasn’t.

  “I wrote him a letter.”

  Freesia glanced up. Her mother was different now—lucid, contrite, accessible. The carrot of truth present, dangling, Freesia pulled back on her shortness, matched her in all ways.

  “Did he get the letter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you never tried again?”

  “I had you,” she said. “That was enough.”

  Freesia bristled. A reflex against the lies, all it was.

  “Except it wasn’t. It never was.” She whispered, tried to sound sympathetic, but to her ears the words still crackled from hurt. “Y
ou tried to replace Elias’s love with men who never treated you right. Men who transferred that same mistreatment onto me.”

  “Those men supported us. Lord knows they didn’t have to.”

  Her insides contracted, every organ folding in on itself. “Those men crossed the line, Mama. And you knew. You knew and you chose to turn away from it. Don’t….” …sit there, defend them, defend yourself, don’t you dare. “I will turn the volume up on this preacher until his sermon rattles the windows. I will sit beside you and I will pray and I may even hold your hand while doing it, but I will not endure one more minute of you pretending you put me ahead of all of them because we both know that’s the biggest lie of them all.”

  Camille’s nostrils flared wide, nothing at all to do with the monumental struggle inside her lungs. “Best you go, child. Leave me to my praying.”

  Leave her, she did. The March back porch was a little like a French Quarter street: bricked, miniaturized, crowded between twin bay windows and too many skinny doors, ceiling fans to move the air, and porch lamps shaped like old gaslights. Charlotte and Alex preferred the sloping grass, the firepit seating area, the distance and stretch of the property. But Freesia had always loved the porch space because it was never too far, never missed anything, never in danger of being abandoned.

  Freesia left the door cracked, unheard of in a Mississippi June. She sampled the wooden bench, carved by Elias’s hand, but stood again when a raspy cough drifted out the door’s opening. And she paced. Her steps burned off the dredge of the past that she had allowed to surface and the categorizing of everything she had given up to be at this moment—her chance in the New York fashion scene, her creative fire, her chance to live life on her terms, and she was left with the companionship of selfishness and shame.

  Her mother was dying and Freesia couldn’t bring her peace.

  “Hi,” said a voice behind her.

  Jay.

  She stopped moving, likely stopped breathing. He stood on the landing of the steps down to the yard, a bouquet of flowers in hand, dressed impossibly as always for the occasion. His shoulders and posture were at ease but a frown creased his brow as if he worried after the reality that she might send him away. Crazy. All she wanted was him, near.

  “Hi,” she echoed, softly.

  Lines at his eyes eased. An almost-smile.

  “I tried the front door,” Jay said by way of explanation. He seemed to forget himself, then remember. “I brought these for your mother. Our gardener said they’d remind her of home.”

  “That’s great. Maybe she’ll canonize you, too.”

  His frown returned.

  She waved away her sarcasm. “It’s thoughtful. Thank you. Seems sickness has given her the newfound ability to appreciate the good in folks,” she added wryly.

  “Everyone but you.”

  Freesia pointed. Perceptive, that one. She smiled, embraced the grim humor of the situation. For a moment, she wondered how he could be here, not in a boardroom or on a conference call at forty-thousand feet. Then she remembered the preacher, the hypocritical talk of prayer.

  “No bike shop today?” she asked.

  “Something important came up.”

  He was unreal. Standing there in his khakis and pressed shirt, his artfully disheveled hair like maple syrup on a tall stack of pancakes, not mincing words about how his priorities were shifting.

  “May I meet her?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Jay smiled at the prospect; he would learn.

  On his way past, smelling like his own brand of heaven, he lifted a sprig of lavender from his clutch and handed it to her. Near the beach shack, at the edge of Estelle’s property line, sea lavender spouted from the salty sand dunes. Jay’s blooms were more cultivated, less wild, but the sentiment—him, really…his presence, his kiss on her cheek before he went inside—trickled through her like a meditation.

  From beyond the door, she watched him sit at Camille’s level, speak like he had all day, smile warmly. She couldn’t imagine what the two had in common—her mama from nothing, Jay from everything—but they exchanged words for long minutes. Camille accepted the flowers, bundled in ribbons—classy, none of that crinkly cellophane from the Food Saver—and pressed them to her nose. The bruises of her features lifted.

  Happiest she had seen her mother all morning.

  Freesia smiled, sat on Elias’s bench.

  Jay asked about the piano in the corner, Camille’s favorite songs. Stella Irene had played, or so Charlotte once said. Camille made a request. Freesia heard words like classical and lessons and some sort of apology sprinkled into their conversation, but damned if Jay didn’t stand and make himself comfortable at the instrument. Thing probably hadn’t been tuned since the trailer out back was rocking with chicken and waffle deliveries. Or not.

  The first notes were simplistic, imperfect, but instantly recognizable. Unchained Melody, firmly in the realm of Camille’s greats—Redding and Charles and every other angsty tune of a bygone era that captured the grit and struggles of a life lived outside opportunity—filled the house, as much a sermon rattling the windows or a prayer on the lips.

  She had never heard it stripped down, the keys, the pedals, and a set of long fingers that had once played her. Though flawed and out of tune on an old instrument, the tune chased concert-level quality. Dimensional, somber, the haunting rifts moved her as much—more—as the needle through the groove of her favorite vinyl. It was Jay, a part of him he gifted freely, flawed, wholly. Likely, more in those moments than she had ever gifted another.

  Sitting atop a bench Elias crafted, tagging along behind the notes with the words she knew in her head, Freesia realized the song’s significance to Camille: lonely rivers flow to the sea; wait for me; are you still mine? The essence of love, denied.

  A sting gathered behind her eyes.

  Freesia blamed the way the notes strung together, the way Jay’s body sat proud but swayed like water through the piece, giving the task what he had. She might have guessed—all his formal education—that his cultured talents were immense. He was Jameson Scott, heir to a vast energy empire, but he was broken bicycle chains and a handwritten note of encouragement taped each day to the glass door of her sewing loft and meals sent to the house each day at five o’clock and the object of her thoughts each sleep and so much more than a pretty face in the rainstorm.

  Jay ended the song with a whisper of the keys and roused himself from his trance-like state, fully awakened to his surroundings. His gaze trickled to Camille, where she lay eyes closed, clutching her flowers, a single streak of wetness, eyes to chin, then upward to Freesia. Two endearing spots flushed his cheeks.

  He joined Freesia on the porch. All she wanted, him near. Without words, she launched into his arms. His embrace felt like a masterpiece, a magic that replaced her slow march into sadness, if only for a time.

  Like all magic, someone who would fade from her life. For now, a meditation on goodbye.

  24

  Alex

  On Wednesday nights, Taffy’s Diner boasted the best fried catfish and Cajun-inspired slaw combination in the state. A few years back, a cable food network host with a British accent and a goiter of an ego had deemed her buttermilk and secret-blend-of-cornmeal-spices batter worthy of an 80-second mention on the episode featuring the best diners in the Old South. Those in the know, namely the Silver Swarm, knew Taffy’s real catfish magic came from the saltiness of single-malt Scotch, not anything found in a spice rack. They also knew the chef with the buttery accent had swept out with his film crew faster than Hazel could reload a shotgun and left a smitten Taffy brokenhearted. It was a tale worthy of Charlotte’s meandering romantic fables.

  Also, not the point of Alex showing up to the Swarm’s weekly dinner tradition.

  Little Maddie and Alex were thirty minutes into asking the hard question that had niggled Alex all week, and all they had accomplished was a CSI-worthy rehashing of Taffy’s past loves, unsolicited advice on
raising a toddler, and the location of the shop where Bernice purchased her 20% hotter than you t-shirt. At least Alex wasn’t getting passed around like a casserole dish in an oven-mitt snuggie.

  As soon as Taffy served up a round of piping hot catfish, the chatter died down but for smatterings of adoration at the plate’s appearance. Alex launched her napalm question.

  “Did my mother have an affair?”

  Frances dropped her fork.

  Taffy rerouted to get an order-up that wasn’t in the window.

  Bernice became inordinately interested in the cleanliness of her butter knife.

  And Hazel gave the bottom of a ketchup bottle a gusty thwack.

  Thwack.

  Thwack.

  Thwack.

  Frances reached over and put her hand over the bottle to stop the motion.

  The Silver Swarm shared potent glances around the booth like they’d been caught swindling Medicare for Vegas fun-money.

  “I thought if anyone could tell us the truth, it would be her best friends.”

  Taffy rejoined them. Sidled into the booth beside Hazel.

  Dear, sweet, diplomatic Frances waded in first. “Whatever makes you say such a thing?”

  Alex relayed her trailer memories, minus the naughty bits, then added the invoice and letters-not-sent circumstantial evidence.

  “You were a child who didn’t understand what she was seeing,” said Frances. “As an adult, you’ve tucked things inside those memories that likely weren’t there.”

  Taffy nodded in agreement.

  “You can’t argue the timing,” said Alex. “That summer, the loss of a baby, then Daddy leaving that November. Their marriage was in turmoil.”