The pixie apologized for the ambush but not the sentiment. “Tell me you have another one on the racks. I’ve been to a million bridal stores….”
“Million,” echoed her friend, her voice nearly a match, who—now that Freesia had a good look at her face—could pass as a twin with a diminutive stud in her nose and a different bottle of color-rinse. Deep burgundy, almost purple.
“I’ve never seen anything so…”
“Perfect, right?” Stud girl’s right more like riiiiiight.
“I was thinking…Junoesque.”
“She’s not lying. Best vocabulary I know.”
“So fresh. So distinctive. Uh, gaud, I’ll buy it right off your exquisite body.”
“A dancer, to be sure.”
“Or yoga.”
“Do tell us where you found it. The suspense overwhelms.”
They were two bees, hiving at once, up in each other’s sentences. The freshest air the shop had seen since Freesia had come.
“I made it,” she said.
Pixie’s chin dropped, her lips reshaping from bowed to bowled-over. “Get. Out.” She turned to stud girl. “She made the dress.”
As if her companion hadn’t been sharing a brain.
“So talented,” said stud girl.
“How much to make another?” Pixie asked.
Freesia glanced at Charlotte. Her steamer wand pushed great billowing plumes of vapor straight up, nowhere near the intended dress. Pretty sure she squealed, too.
“The beading alone took weeks.” Freesia’s hand skimmed the beads carved from the heartwood of a mahogany tree in Sarafina’s yard. She hadn’t thought of the old woman in years.
“Will three cover it?” asked Pixie.
“Hundred?” asked Freesia.
“No, silly. Thousand.”
Charlotte dropped her steamer wand.
Freesia’s tongue felt tied with thread. Badass jungle fronds, indeed.
“Oh dear,” said stud girl. “You’ve offended her. Do five.”
“Five thousand,” said Pixie. “But I’ll need it in time for my portrait session in twelve days.”
“Antonio will die.”
“We’ll have to resuscitate him on the spot when he sees how this dress photographs.”
Stud girl’s expression pinched. “Of course, you don’t have her great breasts.”
“Less beading for sure. Do say you will,” pleaded Pixie.
Charlotte did a little jig into Freesia’s line of vision beyond the girls. Freesia tried to wrap her mind around that kind of cash and struggled. It surprised her that her first thought was the store’s financial desperation and not her mother back in Georgia or a car to replace her clunker.
“I will.”
Pixie and stud girl shrieked and clenched hands like some sort of new-age sorority high-five. Bangles on their wrists clashed together, adding fanfare.
“And your wood accessories—” said Pixie.
“On point,” said stud girl. “Something similar would be—”
“Blest.”
“Immaculate.”
Stud girl turned to Pixie. “Great word.”
“Thanks.”
“Though it will hardly be the right word to describe the one wearing it on her wedding day.”
Both woman dissolved into the giggling space of a private joke. Freesia was either going to love them or loathe them by the time the dress was complete. But the one thing she couldn’t deny was the hive in her belly, buzzing to life.
Pixie held out her hand. “I’m Julia and this is my twin sister, Sierra. We’re not from around here.”
Freesia shook hands. She wanted to say, Get. Out. Interjecting anything, even sarcasm, proved difficult.
“Traveling through on our way home,” said Sierra.
“New Orleans.”
“Road trip.”
“Anyway,” said Julia, handing Freesia a business card from her purse. “Call me when the dress is close to finished. I’ll drop everything, and we’ll come.”
“Everything,” said Sierra. “Love your town. Adorable, with the little...”
“Old-fashioned lampposts.”
“And the flags everywhere?”
“So patriotic.”
Alex’s heels clicked into the space. “Freesia, may I have a word?”
In the short time Freesia had been in Devon, she had learned that Alex had two speech patterns: one tied to Ivy League, corporate, wife of a celebrated politician; one tied to memories of Elias March, arguing with Charlotte, and frogging in the creek—according to those in the know around the Strickland dinner table. This request was pure Boston.
Freesia felt like she’d just swallowed a bee, stinger and all.
She asked Charlotte to take measurements. Freesia had never seen the woman so cheerful. And that was saying something for the Queen of March Family Kumbaya.
“Should I just pay her?” asked Julia.
Freesia smiled and nodded. It took her all the way to the back office before she could suck wind.
Alex closed the office door behind them. The room was a systematic shamble—stacks of papers, sticky notes everywhere with dollar words like purge and queue written in methodical black script, and an air purifier humming in the corner.
“What are you doing?” asked Alex.
“Apparently, making a five-thousand-dollar dress.”
“So I hear.” Alex paced. Difficult, given the room’s current state. “While I agree, the dress is…stunning…you have to go back out there and tell her you made a mistake. You can’t make her dress.”
Freesia bristled. “Why not?”
“Because she thinks Match Made in Devon is part of the transaction.”
“For the last three days, you’ve been going on about how the shop needs money to pay off debts.”
“Come Monday morning, this retail space goes on the market.” Alex pulled away, to the far end of the space cluttered with empty hangars and drapery bags. “The commercial realtor I have lined up already has interest. Match Made in Devon will no longer exist.”
Something deep inside Freesia slipped loose. A clot of self-respect she had only just acquired in the face of new information, a new identity. It raced along her bloodstream, straight to the heart slamming against her ribs, and she knew that letting this go—this shop, this power, this piece of a man she wanted to know more than anything else in this world—was the absolute last disappointment she would take in her young life before faith left her for good.
“Says who? Last I checked, this business isn’t exclusively yours.”
“Charlotte goes along with what I say. She always has.”
Freesia kept her voice steady, measured, only slightly above the volume of Alex’s arrogance. “Maybe it’s time to stop saying things and start listening.”
Alex’s heels clicked a steady return path. Her gaze sparked. Freesia pictured her in a boardroom—dark brown hair pulled back, silk blouse beneath a navy blue pantsuit, a modest dusting of makeup—though she hardly needed it. Alexandra March was lovely in a callous, brooding, protective sort of way.
“Mama may have left you one-third of this business—why remains to be seen—but you don’t get an opinion here. Not about Charlotte and me,” said Alex. “As for the dress, it’s appearances. And a legal issue. A business in closure cannot take on the liability of a transaction of that magnitude gone wrong—especially involving someone with deep pockets and high-paid lawyers on retainer, as she clearly has.”
“You think I can’t do it.”
“That’s just it—I don’t know…We don’t know anything about you.”
“I can sew, I keep my word…” Freesia squared her shoulders, close enough to have to scan Alex’s face to take in its harsh angles. Nothing but eye contact, left to right and back again. “…and I’m your father’s daughter and that is all you get to know after the way you’ve treated me.”
The purifier’s loose rattle was the only thing that could squeeze betw
een them. Alex’s gaze crumbled by small increments. She stepped back, crossed her arms.
“Answer me one question,” Alex said. “Nothing but straight, and I won’t say another word about the dress.”
Freesia narrowed her eyes.
“What do you want from us?”
Freesia couldn’t say she wanted to stop searching the globe to sate a restlessness she feared she would never abandon. She couldn’t say that she wanted the clock to reverse and find her as a child who knew her father. Truthfully, she couldn’t say exactly what she wanted. But honesty was her only currency with a woman who held the key to finding out everything she could about a past denied her.
“I want you to know that we’re not that different. I hurt, same as you.”
Without intention, Freesia’s words emerged faint. More transparent than guarded, more childlike than warrior.
Alex blinked, slowly, as if her fight from moments earlier had hollowed. Her jaw shifted slightly. She swallowed hard, her gaze lowered, trained somewhere near Freesia’s bare shoulder.
“Keep the money,” said Alex, her voice gripped, secretive. “You’ll need it for materials and expenses. Debts will come off the property sale, anyway.”
The bridge was toothpick-thin, too tenuous for Freesia to risk words. She nodded and left the office, betting all five thousand against herself that, once the office door shut, Alex would cry. Tightness coiled behind Freesia’s sternum.
A little like gripping a jungle tree for dear life.
6
Alex
In the town’s diner, aptly named Taffy’s after the proprietress of twenty-five years, Alex poured over the bridal shop’s original contract. And her work proposal. And outstanding vendor orders that had to be canceled—veils, garters, enough tissue boxes to build a fortress around Devon. She chewed on biscuits and peppered gravy and drank scorched coffee. Despite the tasks laid before her that she had tagged in her journal as urgent, her mind strayed to the past.
Her eyes glazed over the bill of sale’s handwritten date.
A year after Elias March returned home from his affair, he and his wife had purchased the two-story brick retail space at 102 Bethel Lane. Alex remembered that day. First time she had been trusted to watch Charlotte, alone. Alex had lost her in the field behind their house. Her parents came home, her mother as breathless as she, Mama from the excitement of purchasing the shop, Alex from the certainty she would be left overnight in the cold field too. Punishments were often like that. Precisely what you put out into the world is what came back.
November 19, 1989.
One year. Alex hadn’t noticed anything, but she’d been a child. Had her father’s guilt eaten at his belly and an outrageous project proved a welcome diversion? When she signed the purchase agreement, had Mama known he had been inside another woman? Hard as Alex tried, nauseating as it was, she failed to separate the deed from the act. Again and again, the visual was persistent. Most days, in her ordinary life, she operated on a steady diet of mindless sex. She wanted it to be the same for her father. Mindless, not steady. She wanted Camilla Day to be a faceless fumbling, a vacant union in the dark with the window open so the waves drowned out sounds and the November wind numbed sensation. Alex knew that locale well.
Everything after Jonah had been November.
Alex had taken to working away from the shop office once Jonah’s frequent trips back to his work truck began to carve a trench through the hardwood floor. Each time he lingered, to ask Charlotte a question or sidestep a rare customer, Alex dialed Michael on her cell. Ten unreciprocated calls later, the diner had become her plan B.
The moment she saw the brooding clan of elder women swarm the entry, eyes on her, Alex knew she needed a plan C.
The five women—collectively known to everyone in town as The Silver Swarm—were a sight to behold. A Geritol posse of salon-coiffed white curls and crafty sweatshirts emblazoned with various passions—cats, garden pots, the shape of Mississippi substituted for the O in Home. All but Taffy, who wore an apron, and Bernice, whose pink shirt read: I’m a virgin (but this is an old shirt). Every one of them had been her mother’s friends. Best friends, though Alex doubted they held equal emotional weight. They were the purveyors of pinochle, the matriarchs of the municipality, and the chief archivists of the second-floor museum of matrimony.
And they looked pissed.
Alex sank lower in the vinyl booth.
Had they been a gang in the true sense, they would have gathered in such a way as to eclipse the morning light slanting in through the blinds, clicking their dentures in a menacing fashion, the baddest of the group propping an orthopedic shoe on Alex’s bench to cut off escape. Intimidating, nonetheless, they squeezed into the booth on both sides, fussed and tittered over where to place their bags and coats like they were at Taffy’s for the long haul, and revolved their coffee mugs atop the paper placemats like it was high noon and nothing but caffeine would do in a standoff.
“What’s this we hear about you rippin’ down the nuptial nook?” Bernice stacked and shoved Alex’s piles aside. Clearly the group’s muscle.
“The nuptial nook?”
“Yeah, you know,” said Bernice. “The wed-loft, the couplin’ cranny, the betrothed balcony—”
“The death-do-us-part dormer,” added Hazel, so named not for her eye color but because she was largely believed to be a nut. Alex hoped she hadn’t brought her sidearm.
A quiet whip of a woman laid her hand atop Alex’s. “They could go all day, dear.”
Taffy sloshed black coffee into the waiting cups. “Must be a hundred names for that space over the years, but most of us just call it damned necessary.”
Alex picked up a fork. “Most of you don’t have a failing business because of it.”
“Now hold on,” said Hazel. “If that business is failing, got nothing to do with that second-floor space.”
Bernice piped up. “If anythin’, that place is what draws people to Devon.”
Their hostess looked affronted.
“Now don’t get your a-strings in a bunch,” Hazel said to Taffy. “Your shrimp and grits would give that Devil’s Kitchen man a new religion.”
A dull pang bloomed hot behind Alex’s right eye. She gathered her papers. “I’d love to chat—”
“Nah you wouldn’t,” said Hazel. “We remember.”
“Never much for talking, this one,” added Taffy.
She would know. Alex had waited tables one summer, and Taffy answered enough something-wrong-with-that-girl? questions to suggest to Mama that she get her eldest daughter’s hearing checked. Alex had heard every banal chitchat word spoken to her. She just always thought the weather or the caliber of the minister’s sermon was a specific kind of torture reserved for those who found themselves in purgatory.
No one made an effort to scoot out of the booth. Alex settled. If she couldn’t get them to move, she could certainly get something from them.
Answers.
“What does ‘never hang wallpaper’ mean?” Alex said.
The women exchanged eye contact, their gazes eventually settling on docile Frances.
Her cheeks pinked and rounded to accommodate a sad smile.
“Do you remember, dear, the autumn your mother got it in her head to wallpaper that room at the end of the upstairs hallway?”
Alex thought back. That year—the same year Daddy left—was like getting twisted in a cobweb—vague with sensation and bothersome in the end. Mama told her she would move into a new room, a big-girl room. She never did.
“Yes.”
“Stella Irene had it planned out,” said Frances. “White lace everything. Clean and fitting for a girl to grow into a young woman, like a blank canvas to make it into whatever you wanted. We all took a piece of furniture home to paint white. Room had such natural light, what with the pair of dormer windows, and all.”
A few of the women nodded.
Frances continued. “But the walls hadn’t held up so well.
Man down at the paint store gave her a steal on rolls of wallpaper that had been returned. Stella Irene thought the pattern was just about the perfect thing. Meant to be. Tiny gray branches, barely there, the suggestion of a bluebird every so often. Keep the room from being too stark.”
At the mention of a bluebird, a warm rush passed through Alex’s body. She remembered the birds, but the memories were tiny, gray.
“About October, when the first chill set in, your mama and Elias set about transforming that room. Stayed up late most nights after they tucked you and Charlotte in. It was important to Stella Irene to surprise you, given what was set to happen.”
Alex felt the spot in which she was sitting shift, though none of them moved. A little like the sand at Constitution Beach, escaping from where her feet had pinned it, out with the tide, none of the families packing up at dusk, wise to what was happening inside her head. That a woman who thought her life had been perfect was not merely enjoying the pink light stretching on the horizon.
“Wasn’t to be, I suppose. But Stella Irene always finished what she started. She was determined that you move into that room, even if they no longer needed yours next to theirs.”
“For what?”
“Why, for the baby.”
No sooner were the words out of Bernice’s mouth then her face took on an expression of indigestion. She glanced at the others, her mouth a grim line.
“You didn’t know?” said Taffy. “Oh dear….”
She set the coffee pot in her hand on a neighboring table and scooted into the booth beside Hazel, who delivered the common knowledge, not so common to Alex.
“Your mama was pregnant that year.”
The air was close. Her lungs didn’t move, didn’t function, like they had forgotten how, and when they remembered, the air charged in, one audible gulp. Stress triggered miscarriage. What the doctor at Brown had said to Alex. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
Frances rubbed circles at Alex’s shoulder with her aged hand. A mini-sun in a vast, arctic wasteland.
Our Bridal Shop (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 1) Page 5