Our Bridal Shop

Chapter 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?"