Chapter 11 Charleigh
Charleigh
Rolling down the highway, Charleigh’s hands clench the steering wheel, feathery pines shimmying past her window as she drifts onto the shoulder.
Her stomach seizes like it always does when she turns down Seven Pines Road. So she rarely does. She likes to keep her past firmly there. Including her mother and father.
Years ago, soon after her wedding, she and Alexander bought her parents’ land for them, freeing them from their harsh landlord, Mr. Greer.
The transaction was sort of an unspoken agreement that the Millers wouldn’t be bothering Charleigh and Alexander much after that. That they’d keep to themselves.
Not that they minded. Ever since Charleigh had left home, they took to calling her highfalutin, too big for her britches, stuck-up.
“You just don’t know how to act no more,” her mother, Ruthlynn, said as she thumped her tin of Skoal, packing down the tobacco.
Charleigh had come home from Dallas one Christmas to visit.
It would be the last time she made that mistake, coming home from school on winter break to see them.
Once she and Alexander moved to Longview and had Nellie, though, they’d bring their daughter out to visit her grandparents on occasion. But Ruthlynn and Hank were no more tender with little Nellie than they had been with Charleigh.
“What is wrong with that child? She’s already a little heathen,” Ruthlynn remarked, loudly, one time, a sour smile creeping across her thin lips. “And her nose is bigger than Dallas.”
As if she were one to talk about manners. That woman has no more class than a drunken hobo.
Charleigh presses on the gas with her Cole Haan moccasins, accelerating so fast that her childhood home blurs past. Which is exactly the goal.
But still, the brutal memories flock back.
Charleigh rising at dawn as young as five years old to go and milk the cows, stomach grumbling with hunger that would be only momentarily satisfied by stale toast and one scrambled egg. They never had enough of anything. Food. Money. Patience. Kindness.
Charleigh feeding the pigs, stepping around their muck.
Cleaning the chicken coop when she got home from school, even when freezing sleet stung her little hands.
And when shit went wrong—and it was always going wrong, like the pasteurizer breaking just as they were getting ready to process the milk—her parents’ already-foul moods would spiral. Charleigh learned early on to scatter, lest she get the stinging wrath of Ruthlynn’s switch or Joe’s belt.
Both her parents drank. And not in the fun, casual way that she does when she’s socializing. To revel. To celebrate.
No, they did it to escape. The cheap alcohol—Old Crow whiskey or Schlitz beer—turned her parents into even more bitter caricatures of their miserable sober selves.
Just driving by the old homestead, Charleigh can summon the smell of her father’s cheap, filthy cigarettes, feel the scorch mark on the top of her thigh where he extinguished one, drunk and cursing her for spilling the carton of Tropicana, a luxury at their home. Can hear their endless bickering.
She can’t believe she’s out here now, but she has no choice.
Nellie.
Just as Kathleen had said, Charleigh couldn’t miss the Swifts. Before she’s even to the end of the road, she spots the red mailbox, slows the Jag to a crawl. Right next to the mailbox is a barn-red sign with lettering:
Swift’s Custom Furniture & Swift’s Apothecary.
Kathleen could have just told her to look for the signs, but that would’ve been too simple.
Charleigh sucks in a breath, turns into the drive. As she crosses the cattle guard, her leather seat thrums beneath her. She doesn’t miss this feeling, of being sucked back into farm life.
But this land is different. Majestic. Their little wooden house is perched back far from the road, the drive a long, meandering lane that slopes over the rolling hills.
The meadow is so green, it’s almost emerald, so much more vibrant than the mud-caked pasture of her childhood.
And the land is dotted with chubby pecan trees so ancient, they look prehistoric.
This homestead is well tended to, cared for, a row of paperwhites lining the drive like little flags.
She eases into the small gravel parking lot, the pebbles crackling under her brand-new tires.
Charleigh steps from the car, peers up at the house.
It’s small but tidy. A homey cabin with what appears to be an upstairs loft. A pair of crystal-clear windows on the second floor wink down at her in the crisp morning light.
The porch, which hugs the front and sides of the house, is wooden, unfinished, but immaculate, without a particle of dust on its threadbare boards. A basket of pecans rests next to a rocker, their caramel-colored shells waiting to be shucked.
Another pair of signs, these smaller but carbon copies of the ones at the entrance, are planted at the front left corner of the house, arrows directing her down a crushed-granite path.
Other than the tractor parked out in the glistening pasture, there’s no other vehicle, no sign of life, so Charleigh is not even certain that anyone’s home.
She treads down the path, rounds the house.
A small wooden shed with the insignia Swift’s Apothecary stands about thirty paces away. There is no door, only an open-air entryway where a door should be.
What the hell, Charleigh thinks, as she strides over.
She mounts the wooden steps—also threadbare but immaculate—pauses at the threshold. Clears her throat.
“Oh! Come on in!” The merry voice chirps, sounding like it’s coming from beneath the baseboards.
Charleigh steps inside. From behind the counter, a woman pops up. She has a bandanna fixed to the top of her head, a dusting rag lolling in her hand.
“Don’t mind me, I was just cleaning the display case.” The woman beams at Charleigh.
Charleigh grins back. Studies her. It’s the same woman she and Nellie spotted downtown soon after the Swifts arrived. The wife, Abigail.
And like that afternoon, Abigail is dressed in what Charleigh, having grown up herself in handsewn clothes, can easily see is a homemade dress.
All of the woman’s attire today is made from gingham, blue and white, and honest to God, it looks like something one of those back-to-basics religious women might wear.
Her face is tanned. Well, maybe it’s just dirt.
Charleigh can’t tell. She’s plain, that’s for sure, verging on homely, but there is an appeal there.
Her voice, for one, is warm, smooth like honey.
Her hair is natural blond—but straw colored, more like dishwater blond.
And even though she’s slender, she seems…
capable. Her blue eyes shine as if the sun is setting behind them, and her demeanor is cheery, but one of forced cheer, Charleigh thinks, as if Abigail has seen hard times but stepped right over them, just kept on going.
She also looks young. Charleigh pegs her for early thirties. Wonders how she has a seventeen-year-old.
“How may I help you?” she asks, tilting her head to one side, placing the rag down. “I’m Abigail, by the way.” Dimples pucker her cheeks as she grins again at Charleigh. She reaches out her hand for Charleigh to shake it.
“Charleigh. Charleigh Andersen.” When Charleigh offers her own hand back, she’s acutely aware of the gold Rolex dangling from her wrist, the clash of their vastly different classes.
“Pleased to meet you, Charleigh. And I like your name. “It’s”—Abigail knits her eyebrows together—“different.”
Charleigh’s used to hearing this. Sometimes it bothers her, but coming from Abigail, she senses it’s a compliment.
Why is she here? What is she supposed to say? I’m looking for your brat daughter because my own brat child already hates her?
“I heard from a friend about your products, so thought I’d drop by, have a look—”
“Ah! Great to hear that word of mouth is spreading!” Abigail clasps her hands together.
“It usually does, but it can take a while, so I’m grateful it’s catching on quickly here.
” She waves her arm around, gesturing to her shelves of amber-colored bottles.
“I bet you’re here for the love potion.” She steps on her tiptoes, pulls down a dropper bottle, slides it across the counter to Charleigh. “It’s my most popular botanical.”
The cream-colored paper label reads, Love Potion Number #9, made with care (and love!) and all-natural oils. Ingredients: ylang-ylang, lavender, jasmine, and amber. Jojoba oil and arnica oil. Charleigh studies the fine print, which is truly so fine that she has to squint: Proverbs 31 Woman.
Huh? Charleigh would have to look that up later. Whatever.
“Here, take a whiff.” Abigail plucks the bottle from Charleigh, twists it open. “Mmmmm…” she sighs. “Keeps your man happy.” A self-satisfied smirk creeps across her face.
Charleigh begrudgingly takes a shallow sniff. “It’s nice. But honestly, I don’t need any help with that.”
Abigail screws the bottle shut. That same cheery grin is fixed on her face. “Yeah, well,” she says, turning, placing the bottle back atop the shelf, “we all think that.” She murmurs this last part in a hushed tone, as if she’s saying it to herself.
“Excuse me?” Irritation ripples across Charleigh’s chest.
Unsmiling, she murmurs this last part in a hushed tone, as if she’s saying it to herself.
The cheery grin is back, this time with a vengeance.
Another tilt of the head as if Abigail feels pity for Charleigh.
“Nothing.” She shakes her head like she’s removing unsavory thoughts.
“Perhaps…you are looking for something else, then?”
Okay, Charleigh doesn’t like her. Doesn’t like how she carries herself. Her audacity, acting like she’s above her lot in life, unbothered by it. And, if Charleigh’s honest, what annoys her most is Abigail’s cheeriness, even if it’s the forced kind.
Charleigh looks past the woman to the rear entrance that, like the front, doesn’t have a door, just an open entryway. She hears sparkling laughter dancing across the field.