To Freesia’s credit, she managed a polite smile.
Alex wanted nothing less.
“I have a life, Charlotte.” Even the soft utterance was a self-inflicted wound. After the funeral, Charlotte had begged her to stay. Alex didn’t want to leave her baby sister, always so emotional, so vulnerable. Never able to stay awake those nights on the balcony, Alex would tell her to lay her head in her lap and she’d stroke her hair, darker then because the summer glow had faded from the strands, and give her most of the blanket to keep her warm. Charlotte had Nash and the kids to keep her warm now. Leaving Mississippi was the only way Alex could survive.
“In Boston. So you said, though I’m convinced with the work you’ve done since you got here, it don’t matter where you are, they find you. I may have been part-time workforce in this place, but Mama was all-parts business. And God rest her, she was about as lost with finances as a plumber in a bridal shop. People want money, Alex. A lot of money, and I don’t know what to tell them. Help me sort this mess. One week. Stay at the house. Work from here, just like you have been.”
The old Alex, striving for perfection, would have stayed. Helped.
Have you been so long gone that you can’t remember?
Alex took a few deep breaths. Her life in Boston was barely holding on by a thread, but it wasn’t as if the thread couldn’t be stretched.
Charlotte turned to Freesia. “What about you?”
“Business is one-third mine. I suppose it’s in my best interest to stick around for a bit.”
Alex wasn’t sure Freesia could be trusted. If Mama’s financial savvy was a toilet jockey in a bridal store, Charlotte was a kid with sticky, cotton-candy hands—sweet but impulsive.
“One week,” said Alex.
Charlotte let out a squeal like she hadn’t just lost her illusions, her common sense, and her marbles in one evening. Or maybe that was just Alex, trying to fit pieces and failing epically. She hugged Alex. Alex’s hands remained at her sides.
Before she left the shop, Charlotte handed her Daddy’s letter. Alexandra. Freesia handed her Daddy’s lost photograph. She didn’t look. One in each coat pocket, lead weights threatening to pull her into the snow. Alex was no longer cold; she was numb.
Today was not going in Alex’s bullet journal.
She was relatively sure her packet of stamps, labels, sticky notes and ribbons meant to organize her chaos contained darker sentiments: you’ll be fine bubble stickers; this too shall pass charms; silver-foiled antique letters in which to spell things out. There were no adhesive gems to substitute for tears she could no longer shed. No magnetic bookmarks with a blasé sentiment to hide the image of her father walking into the Atlantic. No precision-cut paper flowers to make up for the ways she had pruned her life. And there wasn’t enough glitter in her monthly subscription pack—Life Happens, January’s theme—to beautify what she had done all those years ago to drive her father to St. Simmons.
Alex thought her father might show. Sit beside her at the same kitchen table where they had snapped together jigsaw puzzles, deconstructed engines over old newspapers, worked through mind-bending cryptic riddles, and debated the merits of the electoral college before her senior-year competition. She pulled out his favorite honey-infused bourbon whiskey and two shot glasses.
He never came, except in the photograph Freesia gave her.
The temptation had proven too rich to deny. His image was unspectacular, nearly forgettable in all ways but one: he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Had he lost them in the surf?
After three shots, she stopped counting, abandoning her trusted numbers and all pretense of puzzling through answers that night. Why had he driven east? Why not north to Memphis? Sloppy ribs and gritty blues had always been his favorite. How did a hot cup of coffee turn into more? Did he think of them at all? The amber liquid scorched a path down her esophagus. Warmth played first in the belly then spread outward to her body cavity. False warmth, she knew. Liquid courage.
Alexandra.
She traced his handwriting with her fingernail, held the envelope to her nose and breathed deeply, but the paper smelled only of aged pulp, vaguely vanilla, almond-like. The envelope had been sealed completely, no room for secrets to spill out. Daddy never came so she propped the smallest piece of him that remained against the bottle and gave him a tour of her journal. Started the day of her fifteenth birthday after her group of friends swam at the lake and watched fireworks and took liberties in the dark—though she left out those details for her father. Alex had returned that night, spent, never so alive. The humid July moon had been perfect. She wanted all her days to be perfect.
Twenty-three years on, and she was still chasing perfect.
Her head became leaden. She rested it against the soft crook of her arm and flipped through the pages: weekly logs; morning, noon, and night tasks; last month’s stamp with shaded blue droplets for each day she drank eight glasses of water; a habit-tracker grid, noting everything from morning runs to giving her dog, Bear, his medicine. She started with the safe things, the recent pages, but the whiskey gave her courage to flip back, back, to the pages she repurposed, redesigned each new year. Like needles stuck in grooves she couldn’t pry loose because the song hadn’t run to its end: places in the city of significance to her and Michael; a key to the secret illuminati code between a father and daughter; a bucket list, still dots, nothing X-ed out; a sketch of the Kingsley ruins.
An exhale stalled in her throat. She closed her eyes and starved herself of oxygen, allowed nothing in, nothing out, tried on what it might have been like to take her final breath in that long-ago bliss. It would have been the best way to go, but she had wrecked it. Her lungs cramped; her diaphragm tweaked. The moment was gone. Long gone. She inhaled.
Alex flipped to the map page and paused. Alcohol had made her forget the danger in flipping back too far before she had prepared, before she reminded herself to keep breathing. The map was old, taken from her daddy’s glove box the day he returned, re-glued each year, clues added in. Each possible route a different color, calculations of distance versus days. Her gaze swerved along blue for Memphis, yellow for the Florida coast because he had gone there as a child, red for Colorado Springs because he wanted to be in the Air Force more than anything before his accident. But not once had the tip of her pen traveled due east.
It took only a minute to reorganize her chaos. One page ripped and crumpled from the overpriced binder. Two glasses smashed against the mustard-colored dishwasher. Another shot of fire inside, straight from the bottle. An earnest attempt at tears, failed. No, today, most definitely, was not an entry on her Perfect Days list.
3
Charlotte
Charlotte believed a nice to-go cup of coffee with one of those wrappers like in the shipping boxes would make Alex miss the big city less. Heck, if Nash ever showed up with one of those, Charlotte would likely take matters into the backseat of his crew cab. As it turned out, fancy overpriced coffee ain’t mood witchcraft after all. Alex occupied the shop office like a corpse dressed for a board meeting. Charlotte tallied one more grievance against her husband, and Freesia—the one who had been so considerate as to bring three cups at the start of the next business day, a sort of peace offering for being who she was—moved around the shop like she’d been caught pushing on a pull door and everyone within a two-mile radius had witnessed it.
She couldn’t say Freesia was there to learn about bridal couture so much as keep an eye on Alex. Charlotte was the first to admit that Alex was a bit of an acquired taste. Always figuring out what was best before everyone else got to figuring at all. She had certainly made a sour impression straight away, but Charlotte had been in a state of anxiety since the funeral—what with a dozen weddings on the books and robbing Peter to pay Paul in the shop’s accounts. Today was the first day since Mama died that Charlotte felt like someone was taking care of her again. She wanted Freesia to feel that side of Alex, too. Charlotte supposed it was a lot like getting a husba
nd to take out the trash. It would happen in its own time. It would just take some encouraging, is all.
Charlotte intended to give Alex uninterrupted time to sort out the financials. Prove the business was in capable hands should the decision fall toward keeping the shop.
As was often the way, brides came in waves that morning. Mama said the marrying business was feast or famine—everyone was either in love or running from it. Right about the time she was getting to know a new bride in for a solo browse, Charlotte’s noon pickup arrived early. With Alex up to her tailored suit in spreadsheets, Charlotte grabbed Freesia.
“Do you mind giving me a hand?”
Freesia’s eyes rounded like Charlotte had asked her to vacuum between the seats in her minivan and CSI the contents.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Freesia.
“I’ve already measured her. Just help her in and out of the dresses, clip them up the back, and give her your opinion if she asks.” Charlotte jotted down the woman’s size range on a sticky note and whispered, “Don’t mention we may not be here for her big day, since we don’t know for sure.”
“We or you?”
Such a pointed question. One Charlotte wasn’t prepared to answer. “For this week, I guess, makes no difference.”
Freesia considered Charlotte’s answer or her, she couldn’t tell. Freesia was poised, balanced. Nothing to do with her hoop earrings, big as bangles. All that meditation in Nepal that she had told Charlotte about after coming back to her place for supper. Something about Freesia was wise beyond her years. Made you want to confess a lifetime of sins and the 4 a.m. corn chips.
Charlotte gave her a quick smile and a head nod to encourage her toward the bride-to-be. Also, to encourage her to smile. As prudent and deep as her half-sister appeared, she didn’t seem prone to overdoing anything in the happiness department. The previous night, Nash snoring beside her, Charlotte’s mind roamed places she had never been—Saint Simmons Island, a diner adjacent to a lighthouse, a life without a father. She found she liked it, all but the part about family. When she looked at Freesia, into the eyes she shared with Daddy, Charlotte did her best to remember what Alex said: most nights, our daddy was here. Even a smile born from guilt was still a smile.
Charlotte tended to her next bride-in-waiting. Savannah Jones-something-or-other, hyphenated to account for the southern tradition of merging two old-money families, and her mother, Jenna. At times, Charlotte found it hard to tell which was which. Jenna chased the fountain of youth as if it was the last gown in the basement grab at Finlay’s Department Store in New York City. Mama had a term for such customers: light pole brides. Stuck way on up there and believing the world was just waiting for them glow.
Savannah unzipped the dress protector and inspected her Angela Fong hand-beaded limited-edition gown, ordered six months in advance. Her mother regaled anyone within earshot of the arduous journey to arriving at the perfect dress, a tale Charlotte had heard each and every time the cloned duo was in the shop.
“I’ll just fetch your receipt for your delivery signature and you two will be on your way,” said Charlotte.
Preoccupied as the pair were on their smartphones, they must have thought Charlotte had taken a cross-Atlantic flight to get said receipt. In truth, Mama had put the filing system behind the counter on the bottom shelf. Most days, Charlotte’s daughters came by after school, sat cross-legged, and alphabetized receipts by bride’s last name. While Charlotte crouched, the women’s conversation sprinkled down like birdseed, thrown haphazardly.
“Oh. My. God. Eleven o’clock.” Savannah. Charlotte could tell by the affronted, breathy lilt at the conclusion of every utterance. “I didn’t know they made wedding dresses for whales.”
Charlotte froze somewhere between the H and I index cards. Maybe she’d heard wrong. Veils did sound like whales. She replayed it in her brain, trying to convince herself no woman was that unkind while her face grew hotter and hotter.
“Who would marry that?” Jenna’s that was drawn out, sugar sweet, and a thousand percent rotten.
“If she was an inch taller she’d be round.”
“Bedsheet would be a better option at this point.”
Now there was something about these old properties adjacent to Devon’s main drag that niggled at Charlotte’s mind right then. Bethel Lane retail shops had been parceled out of an old factory that once produced pipe organ parts. After an unfortunate fire near the turn of the century, the factory owner had the south wall rebuilt as a curve and inlaid with the finest oak strips, creating an acoustical anomaly to test their pipes that, thirty years later, had the women’s book club at one end hearing the dirty jokes from the barber shop at the other. Charlotte sent up a prayer right then that the bride-to-be, right along with Freesia, hadn’t heard one nasty word.
Charlotte stood, her gaze aimed straight for the old-church-windows-as-mirror display. The woman Charlotte had measured stood beside Freesia, eyeing her reflection. In an empire waist and simple bodice, she was exquisite. All but the trembling chin. Charlotte had seen enough blubbering in this shop to know the telltale signs of an all-out breakdown.
Jenna’s eyes widened, clearly surprised to see Charlotte standing so close. She cleared her throat none too politely. Savannah glanced up from her screen and straightened.
“Seems your receipt must have been stapled to your contract. It’ll be just a minute while I get that for you.”
“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” said Jenna. “We can skip the signature. We know we picked up the dress.”
Light pole brides, believing the world watched them glow.
Charlotte gave a sweet-tea-and-honey smile powerful enough to rot off the mother’s veneers straight away. “Store policy.”
She didn’t wait for the protest. Charlotte stormed back into the office, nearly trampled Alex on her way to the safe and withdrew every last hundred the shop had yet to deposit.
“What the hell, Charlotte?”
Pretty sure the acoustics carried Alex’s voice, too.
Charlotte ignored her sister and marched back to the counter. She shoved the wad of bills in Savannah’s hand and wrestled the dress hanger from her manicured grip.
“My mama, God rest her, abided your heavy-handed elitism, your calls more frequent than nature, and your noxious perfume for ten months. But she ain’t here anymore. You get me now, and it’ll be a frosty day in hell before I sell this dress to anyone who makes another woman feel less than perfect on her wedding day.”
“My wedding is in five days!”
Hysterics did not bode well for Savannah’s coloring. Red. Blotchy. Like an ad for a skin condition ointment that came on during the evening news.
Charlotte shivered. “Well, then, that still gives the groom some time to reflect on marrying such a bitch.”
Jenna’s nostrils flared. “You’re finished. Once this gets out….”
“I just might enjoy being the subject of town gossip.”
The two women made a dramatic exit, complete with a precision-landed high heel in the broken step down to the sidewalk, and a chorus of curses that would ensure no one mistook them for ladies on the way past the barber shop. It wasn’t until they were out of sight that Charlotte felt the spin of her stomach try to reverse the fancy coffee she’d drank earlier.
She glanced over at the bride-to-be. Instead of a trembling chin to match gathered tears, she now saw a smile.
Alex’s expression, however, was not so appealing. Less corpse now. More the rubbernecker to a bad accident. “That was ugly.”
Charlotte shrugged. “Unlike you, we can’t all be perfect.”
Without missing a beat, Freesia added, “Sure as hell looked perfect to me.”
4
Alex
Alex stood eye to eye with a wreath of human hair. Gray. Curled and pinned like a shampoo set down at the Nearer My Shears To Thee hair salon. As big as a Christmas decoration for the front door.
Seven hundred square feet of
unused second-floor retail space and Mama had filled it with a menagerie of artifacts better suited to the wax museum of the bizarre. No wonder she had been on the verge of bankruptcy.
The bones of the space were incredible: natural light streaming in from a three-panel skylight in the roof, stuffy in summer, but in January, welcome; original exposed red brick; sturdy oak railings and dormers, sanded and constructed with craftsmanship and detail that modern-day architecture lacked; a hardwood floor distressed the natural way from a hundred years of foot traffic. With enough white introduced into the space, it would strike the perfect balance between rustic and modern—a sweet spot with southern customers.
At the very least, a good clean-out would get top asking price.
But what to do with the photos? The handwritten notes? The objects? Someone in town must be sentimental enough to get these items back to their owners. Her gaze drifted back to the wreath. Not even the best nana in the world could drum up the nostalgia required to transport that dust-catcher.
Back when the building had been a bar, the owner had spun a tale about how every single bride in his family, dating all the way back to Ireland, had fastened a token of significance to the underpinning of their dresses on their wedding day—a charm, a note, a ribbon, something. Every one of the women, eighteen in all, had claimed the custom brought them good strong marriages because of it. The objects were handed down through the years, eventually stored in the bar’s loft for safekeeping, and the superstition became part of the building’s history. Subsequently, March family history.
Stella Irene and Elias had heard the tale in the bar that night.
Word spread that brides who purchased their dress here and visited the second floor to read the advice and see the artifacts of the couples who had taken vows before them were guaranteed good strong marriages, the way the Irish women experienced years ago. To date, the Match Made in Devon legend hadn’t been refuted. Not once. If any of the unions ever ended in divorce, no one was talking.
Our Bridal Shop (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 1) Page 3