WHEN THEY MET, Tonya was still working as a nursing assistant and Charlie out of his stepdad’s shop. Several months into their relationship, though, George told him he thought it was time for Charlie to strike out on his own. Charlie would keep the customers that he’d accrued, but start working out of a different shop. He wondered if the separation was a test. George was getting older—if Charlie could successfully run his own outpost for a couple of years, then maybe George would retire and leave the big business to him.
So Charlie did move out, but not very far. He took over the lease on a building just across the street, the old post office, and turned it into his own body shop. The space meant for the manager’s office was bigger than anything Charlie could imagine needing for himself, so he suggested that Tonya, who had recently decided to leave her nursing job, take it over and come up with a business for herself. She seemed to love the idea. After a while, she came up with a plan to open a kind of clothing boutique. Going-out clothes, she told people, at inexpensive prices. She said she thought a store like that would really flourish on the shore, as there weren’t any other places to buy the sorts of club attire she had in mind. Charlie hung some drywall and built a little hallway to separate his repair business from her store. When the first shipment of clothing came in from the wholesale vendor, Charlie remembered, they laid them all out for display and then laughed that they hadn’t ordered nearly enough merchandise. What had seemed like a big shipment barely covered the racks and tables she’d spread through the room. But they were still learning how to run businesses and they could both grow, they decided, so they went ahead and had a sign painted. On top, “Charlie’s,” and beneath, “A Tiny Taste of Toot,” after the nickname Tonya’s father used to call her.
“Lilac bling dress size medium $19,” she wrote on the Facebook page she created for the store, above a strapless purple dress with silver sequins embellishing the bust. “Perfect for Easter.”
She posted pictures of white platform pleather boots, gold-studded backpacks, tank tops with the Playboy bunny insignia, Apple Bottom dresses, designer or knockoff handbags: “Prada. Baby blue. They don’t last long when in stock.”
The name was a little confusing to people. Some people thought it sounded more like a children’s store. The name actually caused a rift between Charlie and the mother of his daughter, who wondered if “toot” was a reference that meant Charlie was using again. But some people liked having a little spot to go to. It was nice to have an open business in the otherwise barren downtown of Tasley. Ever since the general store had closed, the only places to buy anything were Charlie’s stepdad’s shop, where you could get a quart of motor oil, or the vending machines alongside the fire station, where neighbors would walk to buy a can of Pepsi.
Charlie worked on cars in the back, and Tonya sold clothes in the front, and occasionally Charlie would wander in while customers were browsing the racks—it was a tiny little place, only room for a few people at once—and she would have to explain that women didn’t like looking at clothes near a man in greasy coveralls. She would hold little promos sometimes—bring a bag of hard candy to feed her sweet tooth, get a free piece of jewelry.
They dressed up for Easter, in bunny costumes for a children’s party. They dressed up for Halloween, he as a zombie and she as a vampire. For this occasion, she composed and posted on Facebook a special edition of a Tonya-ism: “Char has a date . . . he won’t be late . . . I might put him on my plate . . . he might get ate . . . I lookin’ for fresh meat . . . like a dog in heat . . . like a dog and a bone . . . a kid with a cone . . . I’m going to the dark side . . . wonder if he can handle the ride . . .”
“LOL, it’s Char,” Charlie wrote in response. “I’m hanging on for dear life with this ride.”
People had been surprised by their relationship at first. Perhaps because Tonya’s kids’ father was black, people assumed that she was only interested in dating black men. And yet here she was with doughy, bashful Charlie Applegate, whiter than white, and she seemed happy about the relationship. The couple snuggled in bed and drank root beers, or took late night drives to McDonalds for coffee, or grilled burgers outside, or attended to their pets, which had grown to include not only dogs but also chickens and pigs and goats that lived in a pen in the backyard. With Charlie’s acquiescence, they repainted the bedroom in girlish pinks and purples—a gesture that, to those who knew them, seemed both sweet and a little nutty, the idea of adults wanting to live in a Hello Kitty color palette.
“Some people think I have it all,” Tonya wrote on Facebook after they’d been together a little more than a year. “I own my own house, I own two vehicles, I have a farmload of animals, I have two wonderful children, a wonderful man, a closet full of clothes, shoes, two businesses, health, and sanity.”
And there it was, a parable of love in Accomack County, a modern romance of limited budgets and modest expectations and the simplest of pleasures. Still. In the middle of this domestic bliss, there were worries. There were parts of Tonya that Charlie felt he couldn’t access. She almost never talked about her childhood. When stories about her past would come out, they would do so in pieces, halting. She told Charlie, as he remembered, that even those fragments were more than she’d ever shared with anyone else. She didn’t seem to want anyone else to know the parts of her that were soft or vulnerable. She got upset when the house wasn’t spotless, or when she wasn’t put together. He never saw her without makeup or styled hair. She almost never talked about how she felt, about anything, really. Charlie noticed there was a wall built around her and it bothered him.
On the other hand, he was happy he’d been let in as far as he had. The quiet, mysterious hardness that surrounded Tonya—these things seemed like reasonable trade-offs, in order to be with a woman he’d once been too afraid to even talk to in a bar.
One afternoon in late 2011, he suggested they meet for lunch. He took her to the Sage Diner, a place that served all-day breakfast but also proper entrees that came with a salad and dinner roll. He had words planned but couldn’t get them out; he kept having to excuse himself to walk around the parking lot until he could calm his nerves.
“What have you got to say? I know you got to say something,” she said when he came back inside.
He pulled out the silver ring he’d purchased from Walmart. “Will you marry me?”