Our Bridal Shop (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 1)

by Danielle Blair

  Alex looked closer and found Charlotte and Nash’s contribution: a red bandana knotted in a circle, a photo, and a story about the day she brought it to him on his tractor in the field along with a glass of sweet tea, and their “secret.” Always touch toes at night. Even if you go to bed spittin’ mad, it’s a reminder that you’re there, that you love each other, no matter what. She gravitated down the wall, strangers and relationships that had happened in the twenty years since she’d left.

  One wedding photo stopped her. Jonah. His face thinner than it had been during their summers together, his body more fleshed beneath the tuxedo. Beside him, a lithe brunette: hourglass-shaped in creamy white, wavy strands of carefree hair loosened from the up-do, flawless teeth, her mouth opened wide in laughter, everything about her image kind and warm and full of life. An adjacent photo showed the same woman holding a newborn baby.

  A pick wedged itself in Alex’s ribs, cold and brutal. The pressure expanded to her lungs, her stomach, threatening new icy fissures of grief where she had only just begun to heal. She tried not to look at the offering—the handwritten note in immaculate, bullet-journal-worthy script that ended in the words, Slow dance every chance you get. Life is precious. Alex bruised with the weight of the details, things Mama had not told her that night when she had called at Christmas to relay news of his wife’s death. Alex wanted to sit, but for all the objects in the godforsaken shrine to marriage, not one of them was a chair.

  Footfalls sounded on the stairs behind her. The big, clonking, heavy kind. Nash, maybe. Or the contractor she’d hired to inspect the plumbing. Alex backed away from the wall, from Jonah and—God, what was her name? Katherine—the moment they sealed their good and strong and perfect fate in the second-floor mausoleum.

  “Alex?”

  Had she been sitting, she wouldn’t have stumbled back where she thought the railing would catch her. Had it been anyone but Jonah climbing the steps, calling her name in a way that erased every revolution of the clock as if the span between them were a dream, she might have cloaked her mistake in coming here, in spying on the lives of other couples, one in particular. But Jonah always slipped her from her bearings, her absolute zero. She retreated, back, back, away from things she was unprepared to face, things she convinced herself she could avoid for one week—seven days—until her head smacked a dormer beam.

  The pain spiraled and radiated until all that was left was a dull twinge in the same place behind her right eye where her migraines lurked. Her hand went to her hair as a reflex.

  “Are you okay?”

  Jonah’s voice was low, lower than she remembered, with a hint of gravel around an accent not too far off from Charlotte’s, an accent Alex had made a priority to lose once she got to college.

  “Fine,” she said. “You startled me, is all.”

  He reached the top step, in close proximity to her parents’ story, an oak leaf preserved in a sealed bag with a tassel she didn’t remember, and advice she had memorized as far back as she could remember, believing it was the Holy Grail of marriage advice but knowing nothing of what it meant: Never hang wallpaper.

  “Sorry. I can come back another time.” His hand motioned from the ratty ball cap in his grip down the staircase.

  “No,” Alex said, then added, too lively, “No, this is a good time.”

  She walked closer to the railing, the pitched roofline where she could straighten her spine. Find it, maybe.

  “Charlotte said you wanted to see me.”

  Did she? During some of the empty nights in Boston, Jonah snuck into her loneliness, every sigh worthy of her perfect day list until she remembered the pain, her defects. Years had passed since she’d seen him, but he’d never aged in her memories. Not the way he appeared now.

  His brown hair had lightened at the temples—blond or gray, she couldn’t tell. Days spent indoors blanched his skin from the bronze of summers past and the taut bone structure of youth had fleshed slightly. But it wasn’t all an unfair trade to bygone years. Jonah sported broad shoulders and the kind of muscles that came from natural labor.

  “She said you did most things for Mama around here. That you can do almost anything.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I’d like you to renovate this space. Nothing crazy, just the basics. I’ll get someone to clear it out. A few of the spindles on the railing need repair. Some lemon oil, fresh stain.”

  “I don’t know, Alex.”

  “I’ll pay you double what you’d charge anyone else, but I’d need it quick.”

  “How quick?”

  “Yesterday quick. I want to have the shop on the market by the end of the week.”

  He brought the hand holding his ball cap up to scratch the back of his head. In flannel and dirty jeans, he was so far apart from the life Alex had built in Boston that she wanted him. Right then, on the stairs. Anything to spare her from the emptiness inside. Wrong on so many levels.

  “You told anyone about your plans to renovate?” Jonah said renovate like she had suggested Cirque du Soleil from the rafters and a petting zoo for goats on the ground level.

  “The shop has to either turn a profit or we have to sell. Either way, this…clutter…can’t stay.”

  He positioned the cap back on his head. Trim curls of brown hair slipped out from the hat brim at his neck. “Charlotte know?”

  “Charlotte knows flange wave skirts and hand-looped lace. She knows nothing about receivables and cash flow and customer acquisition costs.”

  “Town won’t allow it.”

  “The town hardly took responsibility when their nostalgia drove our mom into debt. Why should they get a voice now?”

  Jonah looked sheepish. He was part of the town, shared in the complicity because he was here, with Katherine and a baby and a life that Alex knew nothing about because she got scared and left. He glanced at his real estate on the wall; he always knew what she was thinking, almost before she did.

  “You can’t tell me the town wouldn’t benefit more from a thriving bridal business that draws in customers with a sizeable budget to blow on a wedding than from a creepy wreath of gray hair.”

  He laughed then. A chuckle, really. One that moved his substantial chest and shoulders beneath the flannel, erased the years again and made her want to do the same, though she failed to see what was funny about this attic of lies. His boots shuffled closer to the wreath. He read off the card affixed to the hairy beast.

  “’Meris and Pete Gardot. Married in 1956. Said the thing that attracted him most to me was my hair. Black, way back when. Pinned and woven and braided, curls all over. Like art, he said. After his mind turned on him, he forgot everything of us but the hair.’ And the advice? ‘Give and give and give until you have nothing left inside. Then give more.’” Jonah glanced back at Alex. “One of my favorite stories. Seven years a stranger to him, she cared for him, took the in sickness part of their vow to heart. Day they put him in the ground, she was at the beauty salon, her hair looking pretty and short. But the moment they turned her around in that chair and she saw all the strands, she dropped to her knees and started gathering them up.”

  Alex didn’t want to change her mind about the hair wreath, about the second floor, about any of it. Her throat closed at the image of an old woman, broken.

  “How is that healthy? To preserve that kind of pain?”

  “It isn’t the preserving of the pain. It’s the preserving of what came before. The inspiration it brings to those just starting out their lives together. Every single item in this space—all the years, all the memories. You can feel it, if you close your eyes.”

  Right then, he closed his eyes, as much a part of the shrine as he was drawing air in front of her. She wanted to tell him that closing her eyes would be pointless, that she couldn’t feel anything anymore, not since a part of him was a part of her and she drove it away, just like Daddy. She waited, watched him feel what she could not until time stretched and his eyelids opened again, slowly, li
ke a man waking from a deep sleep.

  Alex would trade her body, her immaculate loft in Boston, her future days, to have such a connection.

  “I was sorry to hear about your wife. Mama said she always had a kind word.”

  The moment the sentiment left her lips, she wanted to swallow it back. It had been years since Katherine Dufort died, around the same time as Daddy, but not from the same type of cancer. Alex hadn’t seen Jonah on the trip home for her father’s funeral. Some say Jonah turned his focus to renovating his own house, repairs he had pushed aside in Katherine’s illness. Mama knew better. Coordinating meals for months after gave her a backseat to grief. Her words. Also her words: Pitched himself so far down into the hole of loss, daylight couldn’t find him. Preserving what came before, Alex supposed.

  “Thank you.” His response was a reflex, like a bumped elbow where nerve endings scatter the pain for faster recovery. “You, too. Your parents—both of them. I know it must be hard. God, they were such an inspiration.”

  Inspiration. Hmm. Alex tried to ingest his idealism, let it sink in, but the word made her bristle from the barbed edges Jonah did not know. Yet. The perfect family from which she came, no longer perfect.

  “I remember this one time, early on, Katherine and I had a fight. Huge. One of those big ones that unhinges you on the inside, makes you question if you made the biggest mistake of your life, marrying. And on the outside, you’re sure everyone knows just by looking at your face. Crazy thing is, I don’t remember what we argued about. I was building an arbor for a wedding—one of the brides who came through here. Had gone over to your house to borrow a tool from your dad.” Jonah shook his head, his gaze ten miles and as many years away. “Your mom took one look at me, and she knew. Handed me the keys to your dad’s truck, right then. It had that mini-Airstream attached—remember that thing?”

  Her throat caught, a trapped cry, if she was honest. The trailer had sat at the far end of the March property for as long as she could remember. Secluded but not forgotten. Never forgotten. Alex nodded lamely.

  “They had it packed for a camping trip to Arkabutla Lake. Only thing your mom said? She’d always wanted to learn how to make an arbor.”

  Alex’s mind fleshed out the gaps: two lovers twined, camping, neither of them her; Elias and Stella Irene out in the garage, sanding and painting an arbor, coveralls splattered white, stopping long enough for two cold beers and an impromptu dance to the transistor radio on the wall. Though Alex hadn’t heard the story, she didn’t doubt it for one minute. She made a mental note to put an ad in the paper first thing tomorrow morning to sell the Airstream.

  “Sounds like Mama. Ends of the earth to preserve a union.”

  Still, Katherine was gone. And Jonah hadn’t looked away. Not even when his story died, and the air grew heavy with years of things left unsaid between them.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, his voice tight, tender.

  Energetic feet bounded up the stairs. Acoustics like a shotgun. “Daddy, you’ll never guess what.”

  A pale-faced girl with thin black hair and legs like sticks climbed past the top step and crowded Jonah’s space without a thought, without blinking.

  “What, baby?”

  He changed—his posture, his shallow breathing, his tenuous presence. The tautness in his features evaporated. The girl transformed him into someone Alex used to know in the span of an instant. And her smile—oh, God. The same parted-mouth, the same white laughing smile as the one on the wall behind Alex. From the girl’s appearance, no more than eight, maybe nine, Alex wondered if Jonah had contributed anything to her genes beyond the lean stretch of her frame.

  Jonah hugged her and crouched low, eye to eye.

  “I finally got a picture of the Sandhill Crane!” She tugged a camera, strapped loosely around her neck, toward Jonah for him to see the screen.

  “We’re pretty far north of the refuge. Are you sure?” He eyed the screen critically.

  “Gray with a red crown. It has to be one.” The girl eyed Alex, just as skeptical. When Jonah released the camera, she raised it, aimed across the second-floor span, and snapped a photograph.

  “Ibby,” Jonah said, his voice gently reprimanding. “What did I say about asking permission to take someone’s picture? Find your manners.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss. Mind if I steal your picture?”

  Alex loved the honesty in her word, steal. Refreshing, in the recent climate of lies. “Not at all.”

  “The lighting in here is perfection.”

  Precocious and a perfectionist. Alex thought they might get on well should the world fall away and leave the two of them. A smile bubbled to the surface, lightening Alex’s mood.

  Click.

  “All right, Isabel. That’s enough.” This time, Jonah’s voice firmed. “Isabel, I’d like you to meet Alexandra March.”

  “Related to Miss Stella?”

  “Her daughter.”

  “From New York?”

  “Boston, actually,” Alex said.

  Isabel flashed an impulsive, abundant smile. “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “Miss Stella was nice.”

  The purity of the moment was not lost on Alex, but the sorrow that came after was a relentless thief. Hers, theirs, would have been older, nineteen. Boy or girl, Alex couldn’t say. An answering smile proved impossible. Alex nodded.

  Isabel turned back to her father and said, “Can we hurry home? I want to send this to Margaret at the wildlife refuge. She’ll tell me the truth.”

  Jonah’s eyes darted to Alex. “Sure.”

  Isabel hauled him down the steps, as if he were prone to dawdle, something Alex didn’t remember about him. Maybe Devon slowed the impulsiveness of youth.

  “I’ll do the work,” he tossed back to Alex. “But you might want to talk to your sisters.”

  The bill of his cap eclipsed his expression. Sisters. He definitely said sisters, plural. Wheels of gossip spun fast around Devon. It didn’t help matters much that Charlotte often greased the axles.

  Alex listened to Isabel’s airy chatter downstairs and beyond the second-floor windows to the street, as animated as two sparrows in a talking contest. A passing truck pushed through the town, its muffler taking Isabel’s happy notes. Alex’s winter settled again.

  She glanced around. The space was not what it was before, but she could not—would not—change the outcome. Numbers invited guarantees. And to Alex, assurance of anything right now was a far safer road than regret.

  5

  Freesia

  Freesia’s mother had once told her an African tale about a girl named Eshe who gathered fruit at the edge of a jungle. The ground had shook and Eshe heard a throbbing, haunting sound coming from inside the forbidden brush. Unable to think of anything but finding the source of the noise, Eshe navigated crowded vines and bushes until she arrived at a clearing where a lion pounded his paws on a drum. Every animal danced. Eshe held a nearby tree to keep from dancing, for she knew she didn’t belong and feared the animals may turn on her. When Eshe returned to her village, she told them of a place with the most amazing sounds, a place where animals danced. No one believed Eshe. As punishment for lying, she was banished to the jungle. Go, dance with your animals, they mocked.

  In her mother’s version of the story, Eshe stole the lion’s drum, brought it back to the village, and proved she had not lied by playing the instrument’s irresistible notes.

  In Freesia’s twenty-eight-year-old version, Eshe left behind the villagers who had wronged her and spent the rest of her days trying to let go of that tree.

  And she wove badass clothes out of jungle fronds.

  Since the moment Stella Irene March showed up on Freesia’s doorstep six months ago, materialized from the salty past with a story of how she intended to do right by her, Freesia had flirted with the notion that doing right had something to do with Match Made in Devon.

  Now that she was here, with townspeople who put eyes on her everywhere and
stuffed their mouths with deep-fried gossip, in a space where the idea of her threatened two women’s fragile truths, Freesia wasn’t so sure.

  Her fingertips skimmed the intricate weave of a gown’s silk bodice. She liked the detail, the intent, but nothing else about the garment. Mostly, she hated it because she had hung the heavy thing back on the hangar no less than ten times since she agreed to help Charlotte at the bridal shop. Even Coco Chanel would hate her pearl strands if forced to handle them all day, every day. Freesia didn’t belong here. The animals of the bridal jungle believed virginal-white crepe was the textile of love. Freesia held tight to the belief that the material of love should reflect the material of life—colors, frays, accessories picked up as a tourist of the world, culturally-embracing patterns inspired by nature, sometimes messy and chaotic, brilliantly complex in minutiae and extravagantly simple as a whole.

  All day, the shop had been sleepy. Comatose, really. A state Freesia believed was business as usual. Alexandra March may have been coarse-grit sandpaper when it came to news of her father’s infidelity, but her business instincts were smooth. The shop was dying. As much as Freesia loved clothes, the idea of clothes, the passion in Stella Irene’s eyes when she spoke of the place and the crazy-sharp way the woman made her believe there might be something for her in Devon—Freesia would be gone inside one week. Answers, it seemed, were as rare around here as apologies.

  Past midday, two young women paused at the display window and breezed into the shop.

  “I must have that,” said one, pointing at Freesia as if she were for sale.

  The excited woman had coppery pixie hair, kind eyes, and the broad features Freesia had come to identify with Mississippi women. She took Freesia’s skirt in hand and stood back as if parting a theater curtain to reveal something grand.

  Your clothes, Freesia. Not you.

  Freesia glanced down to remember what she wore: a bodice of berry-dyed beading with a keyhole neckline that she had crafted alongside a woman in Liberia, ethereal bell sleeves, and a cream-colored Spanish boho fabric with symmetrical, hand-stitched knots that she had picked up in a Pamplona market.