Chapter 9 #2
Lily stares at the signs and then up at her father and I watch her face shift from confusion to understanding to fury.
"That man said monsters don't belong here." Her voice carries to my window, high and clear and shaking, the raw outrage of a twelve-year-old who can see what's wrong and doesn't understand why nobody stopped it. "Dad, we BELONG here."
Colt pulls her closer. He guides her past the diner and they walk together, Lily clutching her library books to her chest and still talking, about the signs, about the man with the megaphone, about why people say things that aren't true about other people.
I catch them through the viewfinder as they pass the Anchor.
The orc father and his daughter, backlit by the warm glow from Betty's window, walking through a town that someone is trying to take from them.
Colt steady beside her. Lily's chin lifted.
The stack of books between them like a barricade against everything the signs said.
My finger presses the shutter. The best photograph I've taken all month, and I know it before I check the preview screen.
After the last car pulls away from the curb, Mom pours herself a cup of tea.
She drinks it and eats half a sandwich I make from the bread and cheese in my fridge, and she doesn't comment on the bread being store-brand or the cheese being from a block I cut with a steak knife because I can't find a cheese slicer I'm not sure I own.
We talk about my aunt's hip surgery and my cousin Adelaide's second baby and my father's retirement—the safe topics, the ones that don't require us to face the four years we lost. Mom lingers on Adelaide.
The nursery colors, the name they picked, how Adelaide's husband cries every time he holds the baby.
The question sits in every detail she chooses: when will it be your turn?
She doesn't know about the PCOS. I've never told her.
I've really told anyone except the gynecologist who handed me the diagnosis at twenty-two and the pamphlet I threw in the trash on my way out of the clinic.
But the safe topics run out faster than either of us expected, and by evening we're sitting in the quiet that comes when two people have said everything except the thing that matters.
She stands and puts on her coat. She's booked a room at the Cove Hotel, because my mother doesn't sleep on pull-out couches, and I don't have one anyway.
"The man you mentioned on the phone." She buttons the toggles from the bottom.
My throat catches. "What about him?"
She adjusts her collar. "Your father ran too. Before we were married. Drove to Nevada in his father's Plymouth. Gone for a week. Came back with a ring and a sunburn. That was thirty-six years ago." She picks up her handbag. "Some people need to exhaust every road."
I stare at her. "Sarah said the same thing."
"Who's Sarah?"
"The president's wife. Of the motorcycle club."
My mother's face cycles through surprise, shock, and then a careful nod, the kind she gives when she's decided to accept information she doesn't understand because the alternative is asking questions she isn't ready for.
"I see. Well." She slings her bag over her shoulder. "She sounds sensible."
I walk her down to the parking lot. The Lexus shines under the Anchor's exterior light, out of place next to the trucks and beaters and the empty space where Rex's Harley used to sit. She opens the driver's door and pauses.
"Holly."
"Yeah?"
"The photographs upstairs." She holds my gaze and her eyes match mine—same brown, same directness, the stubbornness I swore I got from Dad. "Get them off that clothesline and into a gallery. Or a magazine. Or anywhere people can see them, Holly."
She gets in the car, adjusts the mirrors, and pulls out of the lot without turning around, because Patricia Summers doesn't turn around.
I watch the taillights until they turn the corner toward the hotel.
Then I climb the stairs to my apartment and sit in the kitchen in the dark with my camera in my lap and the photographs swaying on the clothesline above me, and I think about my mother's story.
My father in a Plymouth. Rex on a Harley.
Me with a camera bag and no reason to stay anywhere until this town gave me one.
The day's shots fill the camera's display when I pull them up. The rally. The signs. Rickman's face. Betty in her doorway. Gerald at her side.
Colt and Lily.
I zoom in on the photograph—the backlit silhouette, Lily's chin lifted, the books pressed against her ribs. The warm glow from Betty's window painting them in amber. A father and his daughter walking through hate and coming out the other side upright.
The file drags into the NIGHTFALL COVE SHOW folder on my laptop. The show I'm building for the walls of the Anchor, the one Sal handed me a hammer for.
This photograph belongs on those walls. The rally shots belong in Knox's inbox—every face, every sign, every license plate. I open my email and start attaching files and send them off to him.
I close the laptop and lean back and listen to the building settle beneath me. Sal closing down the bar, glasses clinking into the dishwasher, the register drawer sliding shut. The same sounds I fall asleep to every night.