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

by Danielle Blair

  In Charlotte’s daydreams, she was behind the wheel.

  17

  Freesia

  The previous week had passed in a parade of measurements for Julia’s bridal party, and Freesia wrapping her mind and fingertips around crafting six hand-beaded maxi bridesmaid dresses. An original in white, the dress boasted a slight ruche at the neckline, a sparse floral motif of tiny silvery beads clustered at the waist and sheer cap sleeves, and a subtle flare at the hem. Freesia called it Sinead because her friend’s intervention in Spain had made the bride’s dress possible, forever her good luck charm.

  Julia called the Sinead an understated paragon. She also threw out words like utopia and axiom that seemed to have little to do with fashion but made Freesia feel like she had created a dress powerful enough to shape human history. Should Freesia ever need a fashion writer to describe her creations in one of those pretentious magazine spreads, she would hire Julia.

  Freesia viewed it as a distraction—exciting, yes, a distraction, nevertheless—to the primary reason she had come to Devon: to know her father. She would not find his personality, his history, the machinations of his decisions inside sheer-and-lace bodices or saffron organza or embellished sleeves. When Saturday closing time came, she gladly shed her shears, her notebook filled with bridesmaid party measurements and her insecurities about her sewing ability and swapped them for the open road. Daylight waited longer to lift. Early spring evenings stretched long. The more she drove Elias March’s old truck, the closer he came.

  On this day, she selected Enzo. No last name, perhaps because the first was so distinctive. His name was scrawled across Point Coupee Parish on the faded map. Freesia liked that the Louisiana parish looked like a woman in a dress flexing her bicep. Gave her a good feeling that she was on the right path. Like the name of the lone red-light town in the distance: Petit Laurent.

  Freesia stopped at a gas station, no more than three squat odometer-style pumps with missing hoses and nozzles and a mini-barn behind it that had seen better days. Not a place she would have normally stopped, but this was the closest thing she’d seen to a town for miles.

  But for the dim light snaking out of the windows, the shack looked abandoned. Outside the truck, trees, insects, and critters seemed the greater population. A spent rifle cartridge by the door gave her pause. By then, three men inside had made eye contact.

  At her entry, conversation halted.

  The barrel-shaped man behind the counter said, “You lost?”

  Interesting choice of words. Not can I help you? or how you doin’? but worst-case scenario.

  “Why would you assume that?”

  “No stranger comes here on purpose.”

  Her inner voice told her to rein in the questions. Not that her connection repellant wasn’t warranted here. The store consisted of one island of shelves, bisecting the store into two distinct sections: ways to circumvent the law—ammo, camouflage accessories, malt liquor; and ways to fill your gut while outlawing—venison jerky, pork rinds, those round-filled snacks that looked like dog treats. With two dirt-caked windows and one florescent light buzzing overhead, the place was insular, forgotten. Like her heart needed a pulse-boost from spotting the most important detail.

  A confederate flag adorning the front of the register counter.

  She shifted the key ring in her hand, slid her first and second fingers through what looked like the eyeholes of a cute kitty-shaped charm. The ears were 1095 carbon steel, corners sharp as an ice pick, just the right spacing for eye-gouging.

  “I’m looking for a man named Enzo. He might be from around here.”

  The second guy—younger, buff, tattoos crawling on him like scarab beetles—said, “You the law?” His gaze slimed down her body—her chest, her waist, her calves—all the places she might holster a weapon if she were a plain-clothed cop, she told herself. Not the places of exposed skin.

  “No.” Freesia worked to maintain eye contact. Her soul was already clambering back to the truck, turning over the engine, doing ninety down the backroads. She placed the map on the counter, folded so that Petit Laurent was the center of the universe. “This town is at the center of his name.”

  Barrel man gave a cursory glance. “So it is.”

  If anyone here was sane—certainly not her—it was the third guy holding the open bag of cheese puffs. He looked like a creepy gym teacher whose fashion sense was trapped in the 1970s—football coach moustache, wire glasses, chewed toothpick hanging loose from his flaccid lips. The vibe from him was that he was in his own personal kink, not the collective kink that could get someone strung up by a three-hundred-year-old live oak, twisting in the swamp air, and forgotten under cover of Spanish moss.

  The conversational space stretched to absurdity, left her perched on the edge of her fingernails. But she had already injected herself into this parallel universe. Might as well see it through. She didn’t want to leave without taking one step closer to Elias March.

  “Name was unique. I thought someone might know him,” Freesia said. “I believe he knew my father.”

  “Enzo?” Tattoo guy. Added bonus: missing teeth. “Not likely.”

  Either Enzo lived on society’s fringe or the Magic Mike in front of her belonged to a fraternal order of a very ugly kind along with the elusive Enzo. She couldn’t imagine Elias March associating with anyone fueled by such hatred. Elias had loved her mother.

  “So you know him?”

  Barrel guy leaned his bulk against the counter and said something like Yeop or Yaw.

  They weren’t going to tell her. As plain as the Southern Cross in blue stars staring her in the face. She’d go down the road. Stop at a diner with food and women. Maybe they’d know something. But the urge, deep down inside, that ignited her down back roads every Saturday, hundreds of miles on end, refused to die. Enzo was here, known. After twenty-eight years, she wasn’t about to let some illiterate racists deny her a father.

  “I can see I’m not welcome here. Someday, if any of you had a daughter who had been denied access to you, who wanted to know you more than just about anything and had chased you around the world only to find out it was too late. That you’d taken your last breath before she had a chance to know you. Well, I’d be sure to help her, if I could.”

  Her last shot, tapping into the universal emotion of fathers and daughters, netted a response from the most unlikely ally among them.

  “Enzo lives out on a houseboat, False River,” said tattoo guy. “Turn off’s ’bout four miles that way.”

  He looked like someone had jacked him in the groin and he fought the gremlins of body-racking nerve damage to keep from showing the impact. A daughter, denied him, likely from incarceration. Freesia almost felt sorry for him.

  Almost.

  “Thanks.” She eyed each one of them, in turn, hesitant to turn her back. Map secured in hand, she took steps back…one, two.

  Toothpick guy matched her backward progress with a foot forward, a dance of horrific possibility. Freesia’s heart scaled her windpipe, threatened to cut off air.

  The door behind her swung open.

  “Hey, boys.”

  Freesia would have face-palmed had she not had a death-grip on her kitty-as-weapon. Charlotte.

  “Y’all don’t have any of those hot dogs that turn in the warmer, do you? I’ve been telling this one here”…she nodded toward her traveling companion—Alex—also face-palm…“that nothing sounded better for the last twenty miles than a toasted wiener.”

  Jesus, Charlotte. Nothing like inviting three guys who got laid by intimidation to a three-on-three. Freesia shuddered at the thought. Charlotte continued her diatribe about food and having to take a tinkle because she’d had too much coffee. How very large men were waiting on them to arrive and how they’d come looking if’n they were late. All while commandeering a bottle of soda and shaking it behind her back on her way to the register before she plunked down a five-dollar bill. Charlotte’s method of confusing the male species with
a thousand words and a rather annoying stage voice added up to nothing of any real substance. It was a smoke screen of female irritation, and it damn near caused Freesia to weep from its glorious effectiveness—that was, until Charlotte ran out of things to say.

  Like a taser gun that had run out of charge, the silence alighted the three locals in the sharp, buzzing light. They encroached.

  Freesia grabbed Charlotte’s wrist and dragged her back before she could launch into a sermon on how much herpes felt like a bonfire or how she had contacted a flesh-eating bacterium on her last trip down south.

  Alex stepped in the men’s path.

  “I’ve been taking a 420-pixel video since the moment we walked in. Got all three of you—visual, voice, all of it—and uploaded it to the social media accounts of law enforcement entities within a fifty-mile radius with a time and date stamp should any of you make a bad choice right now. I suggest we all go about our business here.”

  “The fuck are you?” Tattoo guy flexed his neck tendons.

  Without a breath, Alex answered, “I’m her sister, and I’m taking her home.”

  Freesia’s brain shut down—the stagnate air whooshing in at her back, Charlotte calling back “Keep the change” as if they wouldn’t think to without her permission, the tug on both arms, the gravel kicking up beneath their steps, the hushed utterances about keys and rides and vehicle doors open. She couldn’t say it was the fear, the absolute possibility of being assaulted and left for dead where no one would find them. It’s entirely possible the word sister short-circuited her good sense, the one she’d left behind in her almighty quest to find Elias, to risk personal safety for one morsel of truth about her past. But she was in his old Ford, passenger seat, Alex behind the wheel, before she remembered her feet moving. Gravel from beneath Charlotte’s minivan tires sprayed an impressive fan onto their windshield, left them speeding through an impressive wake of dusty twilight, both cars wrangling the windy, two-lane road.

  Alex said nothing. She didn’t have to. The ancient glow from the dashboard’s dials illuminated her features, as hard as Freesia had ever seen.

  The three sisters stopped in a parking lot between an all-night pancake house and a Seventh Day Adventist church packed with prayer-goers and families. Ten minutes had passed since their grand escape. Charlotte had been crying. Alex had been stewing. And Freesia? Well, she had been calculating directions back to the turnoff to Enzo’s boathouse.

  Upon exiting the two vehicles, Alex hugged Charlotte and kept her close, effectively aligning the three to their rightful places yet again. The word sister a vapor that left Freesia wondering if she had imagined it.

  Alex launched into the tirade Freesia knew was coming. “Freesia, what were you thinking? Not every place around here is Devon. You’re in the land of the willfully ignorant, the hatefuls stuck back a hundred years ago.”

  “That’s rich, Alex. You think we don’t grow a bumper crop of racists in Georgia? That I’m not painfully aware that we look different and that down here, you pass for accepted and I’m questioned at every turn?”

  “Then why stop? What’s so goddamned important that you’re willing to risk your safety? Our safety?”

  “No one asked you to come.”

  “You’re right. No one did. Least of all the woman, whom we barely know, who came into our lives with nothing more than a grand story about our mother kicking up remorseful sand on a coastal beach, who won’t tell us where she creeps off to every Saturday but expects us to trust her to come back.”

  “What do you expect? I can’t get answers from you—either one of you. You, Alex, packing up the second floor without consulting either one of us, secreting off to Boston, to some grand life that you don’t even tell your sister about. And you, Charlotte, pretending we’re best friends because that’s what you think we should be, so buried in what others expect of you that you can’t even decipher if you’d give me a second thought if we met on the street.”

  “You’re angry at her for trying?”

  “I’m angry because nothing here is real.”

  “You want real?” asked Alex. “I lost my job and my marriage in one weekend. I sleep with just about anyone who makes me feel smart enough to figure out my own screwed-up life, and I can’t remember the last time I cried. Not at Daddy’s funeral, not at Mama’s graveside. I’m a stone-cold, icy bitch, and I can’t find my way back to the person I was even if there was a blinking neon arrow to follow. I hate myself every day because of things I can’t change, and the one guarantee I have left to hold onto in this life is beside me so scared she can barely stand. That’s my real, Freesia.”

  The void left in the wake of Alex’s confession ached to be filled. Freesia’s chest felt like a flash-burn of nothing she didn’t want and everything that she had begged for, the window out of a burning fire that required oxygen and air and something from her that resembled truth.

  “You standing in front of me, calling me your sister back then, was the realest thing I’ve felt in twenty years.”

  Freesia couldn’t have predicted what her admission would do to Alex. A cooling of heat, maybe. Possibly a crumbling into a wordless vacuum of silence. She couldn’t have predicted that her shameful begging for acceptance would take Alex off-balance, require her to take a few steps, latch down the tailgate, sit and stare at her joined hands. Freesia had rendered Alex speechless.

  Across the parking lot, car doors slammed, well-wishers hugged and bid goodbye, what Freesia should do from this moment on if she valued her sanity. She had to accept that what was here, with the March sisters, may not be the route to answers, to Elias, to acceptance she may spend her entire life pursuing but never getting.

  Charlotte sniffled. “Real talk? I thought the one with the tattoos was hot. Well, with some dental work and a philosophy adjustment that a good woman could provide.”

  The comment was so left-field, Freesia had nothing. Alex, apparently, had nothing either. Her jaw dropped a bit but no words came. She offered more of a pffuh from her lips that morphed into laughter, drizzling and sketchy at first but strong enough to elicit the same from Charlotte. Slow to build and self-conscious at first, but joined with her sister, something that expanded to a release both satisfying to the ears and capable of snapping the wire of tension.

  Freesia joined in the laughter. Belly, lungs, limbs—they all squeezed out the dark, toxic weight, made room for new, lighter things. Native night sounds swapped places with their chuckles as they died.

  Alex asked, “What now?”

  “I want to go home,” said Charlotte. “I might need to check my britches.”

  Charlotte’s way of saying she had been scared. They all were. Freesia looked to Alex.

  “I want to finish what Freesia started tonight. Whatever she came out here to do. This time, with us. No more secrets.”

  Charlotte and Alex both looked at Freesia. She realized that she held power, unlike any she had known before. She vowed to be a good steward of that trust.

  “The names on the map are men your father counseled. Some he found through the prison system, some through church. Some young, some old. Two of them have already passed away. One of them became a cardiac surgeon in upstate Pennsylvania. Invented some device that opens up arteries, allows blood to flow again.”

  “Did you know Daddy did that?” Charlotte asked Alex.

  Alex shook her head. “And this one?”

  “If his acquaintances are any indication, I doubt he’s a NASA engineer.”

  “What do these men tell you about Daddy?” Charlotte sat beside Alex on the tailgate.

  Freesia shrugged. “Little things, like the make and model of the first car he ever pieced together with his two hands, his favorite mixed drink.”

  “Single malt scotch, neat,” said Alex, as if they were in the throes of a trivia game and contestant number one had to prove herself. “Nineteen fifty-five Imperial Crown, white, where it wasn’t rusted.”

  Freesia got it. Alex was a dad
dy’s girl. Knew every goddamned thing there was to know about the man. Well, almost. Freesia shouldn’t. She really shouldn’t, but Alex sat there so smug, details spilling from her frowning lips faster than Freesia could recall them from her travels. Freesia should be a good steward of truth, but she was not above a good comeuppance.

  “Big things, too,” said Freesia. “Like your daddy’s real job.”

  Freesia left a vacancy, right there for Alex to fill, knowing she couldn’t. Artero Valjean had told Freesia as much on the third Sunday of the month, visiting hours, through the glass of a correctional institution outside of Leaksville.

  “Daddy sold electric steel at Mendenhal,” said Charlotte.

  “According to Artero, the steel company did massive layoffs in the late eighties. Artero got a job as a carny. Your dad followed the traveling carnival around, doing ride maintenance, picking up odd jobs in the towns they stopped in. Said he never told his family because he was too embarrassed.”

  Alex shook her head. “No. He would have told me.”

  “Before or after you needed tuition for private school?” asked Charlotte.

  The comment was a one-off, a symptom of coming down from the day’s events, the adrenaline cocktail they’d shared, but that did nothing to lessen its impact. Alex slid from the tailgate, distanced herself, what Freesia was fast learning she did when challenged.

  “Private school was Mama’s idea. Don’t put that on me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. It never comes down to you.”

  “It always comes down to me, Charlotte. Always.” Alex’s voice was oddly distant, quiet, as if she had long ago accepted the inevitability of the burden.

  Freesia thought she would enjoy the balancing of the informational scales but seeing Alex and Charlotte at cross purposes did a number on her insides. She understood none of the old gripes, but if they pulled three directions at the thread that knotted them together, they would remain in place.