Chapter 9 #2
She went inside and ate a sandwich standing up at the counter. Then she picked up her camera bag and her keys, and she walked into town.
Harbor Brew had the good afternoon light.
It slanted through the front windows and made the wood floor look honey-colored.
Melissa sat at a two-top near the window with her camera bag on the chair opposite her and her coffee cooling in front of her and her hands flat on the table where she could see them.
She had told herself she was going to sit here and do nothing else. No shooting or asking anyone for permission to shoot later. The camera was along for company and for nothing more.
She had repeated that promise to herself three times on the walk over and once more when she pushed the door open and heard the bell above it. The bag had come along anyway, because her compromise with her own cowardice was that the camera got to be in the room.
Jan was behind the counter, wiping down the espresso machine with the thorough, absent motion of somebody who had done it ten thousand times. She was humming something. Melissa couldn’t hear the tune over the steam wand, but she could see Jan’s shoulders keeping time with it.
That was one.
Jan’s sleeve kept riding up and she kept pushing it back down with the inside of her wrist so she wouldn’t get coffee on it. Little practiced flick. Up, flick, down. Up, flick, down. Melissa’s fingers twitched on the table.
She didn’t lift the camera.
She just watched.
The door opened and Sally Morris came in, the Bayview General Store’s straw tote over her shoulder, her silver hair in its usual low braid.
She waved at Jan without stopping and slid into the corner booth where a younger woman was already waiting with a stack of papers.
The younger woman was pointing at something on the top page.
Sally was frowning. Melissa recognized the frown.
She’d seen it on Sally at the sunset gatherings, aimed at anyone who tried to offer help with the food she hadn’t asked for help with.
“I am telling you, it’s two hundred for the small, and that’s what I’ve always paid,” Sally said, loud enough to carry.
“I know, but the vendor’s saying—”
“The vendor can say a lot of things. I don’t care what the vendor is saying. If I pay two-fifty for a small candle, I lose money on every single one. I’ve been doing this for nineteen years.”
Candle inventory. Melissa almost smiled.
That was two.
Her hands stayed in her lap.
A mother came in next, pushing the door open with her hip because she had a toddler on the other arm.
The toddler was maybe two, in a sunhat that had slipped down over one eye, and a small striped shirt, and she was clearly unhappy about the hat.
The mother got into line, shifted the toddler onto her hip, and without looking, reached up and adjusted the brim with one hand, tipping it back off the little girl’s eye so she could see again.
The toddler stopped fussing and stuck her fist in her mouth.
Three.
Melissa’s eye did the thing. The automatic framing and the geometry of it.
The hand coming down, the hat tipping back, the toddler’s face emerging into the light of the window, the mother’s shoulder making a strong diagonal across the frame.
She could see the shot. She could also see, already, where she would crop it.
She did not lift the camera.
She sat with the pressure of wanting to and did not lift it.
Her coffee was getting cold. She took a sip anyway. The mother ordered something iced and moved to the pickup side of the counter. The toddler started fussing again about something new. The mother adjusted her. The hat didn’t move this time.
The door kept opening. Customers came and went.
The afternoon assembled itself out of small, repeated gestures, the way afternoons in small towns always did.
Jan poured. Sally argued. Somebody ordered a muffin.
Somebody’s dog, tied to the railing out front, barked once and then settled.
An older man in a Coast Guard cap sat at the counter and Jan set a mug down in front of him without being asked.
Melissa wondered if the man knew Clint. Everyone with that cap around here probably did.
She wondered whether Clint had sat at this counter at some point in the last three years and ordered coffee from Jan without saying hello.
Probably. It was the kind of small, careful contact Clint was good at.
Being in a place without really being in it.
She knew that trick. She had been working that trick for two years.
Clint had done the harder thing yesterday morning. He had stood in the courtyard and admitted he was hiding. So had she.
Maybe this was the next part. Sitting in a room. Learning the light again. Letting her eye move without asking her hands to follow.
Melissa watched all of it.
She thought, distantly, this is what I used to do.
The seeing. Before a camera ever came up to her face, there had been this.
The long, quiet absorption. Learning a room the way you learned a song, figuring out the beats, the pauses, and the place the unexpected sound came from.
She’d forgotten how much of her work used to happen before the shutter ever moved.
After the hurricane, she’d decided she’d lost her eye. She had believed that for two years. But the truth was, she’d only stopped letting herself use it.
She looked at the mother adjusting her toddler’s hat, at Jan’s absent humming, and Sally’s frown aimed at her own spreadsheet.
I’m still here.
Her hands were in her lap. Her camera was in the bag. The shutter was not moving.
But her eye was working again.
She stayed until her coffee was completely cold and the light in the window had shifted two inches along the floor. Jan came by and asked if she wanted a warm-up. Melissa said no thank you and smiled, and Jan smiled back, and went on.
Melissa stood. She put her bag over her shoulder. She left a tip on the table, two crumpled dollars and the change from her coffee, the way Emily always did.
She stopped at the bulletin board on her way out.
The community board. Missing cat flyers, a guitar lesson ad, a Beacon Lights Boat Parade call for volunteers, and a hand-drawn poster for an open mic at the Sandpiper.
Somebody’s hand had drawn a small careful star next to the open mic poster in blue ballpoint.
A single star, with no explanation around it.
She looked at it for a moment, then pushed through the door.
Outside, the sun was warm on her shoulders. She walked a block before she realized she was crying. Not sad tears. More like a welcomed release. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist and kept walking.
At the crosswalk on Main she reached into her bag. Her fingers found the body of the camera and stayed there. Cool metal, familiar grip, the edge of the strap she had replaced once in a hotel room in Louisiana.
She held it there for a few seconds. Then she let go and kept walking home, her hand swinging free at her side.