Chapter 12
Melissa woke to the hum of the ceiling fan and a to-do list already forming in her head.
She sat up against the headboard and pulled her laptop from the nightstand. The folder she’d made the night before was still there. Portraits. Three images inside. Winnie at the window. Winnie smiling. Winnie in the quiet after.
She opened a new document and started writing names.
Jan. Sally. Bryan. Cassidy. Emily. Grant. Clint.
She stared at the last name for a while, then moved it to the bottom.
The others she could picture. She could see Jan at the espresso machine with her sleeves pushed up. She could see Sally behind her counter with a pencil stuck in her hair. Bryan in the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder. These were people she’d been watching for months already.
The difference now was that she was going to walk up and ask them.
She closed the laptop before she could talk herself out of it. She showered, then ate a piece of toast standing over the sink. She loaded two lenses and a spare battery into her bag. Her hands were surprisingly steady.
You know how to do this. You always did.
She locked the cottage behind her and walked toward town before the heat settled in.
Harbor Brew at seven forty-five. Dark roast and warm blueberry muffins, with a morning line that reached the door. Jan stood behind the counter with her hair in a thick braid over one shoulder, pulling shots with the speed of someone who’d done it ten thousand times.
Melissa waited until the rush thinned before she approached. She set her camera bag on the floor between her feet and waited for Jan to finish steaming milk for a regular.
“Jan, when you get a minute.”
“I have approximately forty-five seconds.”
“Okay. Forty-five seconds.” Melissa took a breath. “I’m working on a portrait series. The town. People in their workspaces. I’d love to photograph you here if you’re willing. Nothing posed. Just you doing what you do.”
Jan wiped her hands on her apron and studied Melissa over the espresso machine. “You’re asking permission.”
“I’m asking permission.”
“I’ve had tourists shoot video of me without asking. Like I’m a zoo animal.”
“I know. I’m not them.”
“You’re not.” Jan finished wiping and draped the towel over the handle of the steam wand. “When do you want to do it?”
“Right now, if that’s okay. I’d stay out of the way. Anything you don’t want me to use, I delete. Even the ones you just don’t like.”
“Shoot it.” Jan waved a hand and turned back to the machine. “Just don’t get my bad side.”
“You don’t have a bad side.”
“Flatterer.”
Melissa lifted the camera and stepped back toward the window so the morning light fell across the counter from the east. She didn’t say anything else. She let Jan forget her. It took about two minutes.
Jan hummed under her breath the way she always did when the line got long.
Melissa took the first frame when Jan was steaming milk, her face half-turned toward the thermometer, her braid swinging with the small tilt of her head.
She took another when Jan laughed at something a customer said, her whole face opening into it.
She got one of Jan’s hands on the handle of the coffeepot, a small scar on the inside of her wrist just barely visible under her sleeve.
She moved once, to the side of the counter, to catch Jan in profile while she rang up a cup of drip for a silver-haired man in a fishing cap. The light caught the small silver hoop in Jan’s ear and the flyaway strands along her temple. Jan didn’t glance over once.
She stayed twenty minutes. She left before Jan asked her to.
Outside, she slipped the camera back in the bag and stood a moment on the sidewalk. Her heart was running a little faster than it should have been for a woman who’d taken fewer than forty frames. She pressed her palm flat against the camera bag and waited for it to settle.
Sally’s store was quieter.
Bayview General was cool inside and faintly sweet, lavender sachets and honey and old wood. Sally was crouched on the floor when Melissa came in, arranging a new shipment of jam jars on the lowest shelf, muttering something about the supplier’s invoice.
“Bad morning?”
“Supplier shorted me on the strawberry again.”
Melissa leaned on the counter. “Sally. Can I ask you something?”
“Ask away.”
“I’m doing a portrait project. For the community. Real portraits in real places. I’d like to photograph you. Here, in the store. Doing whatever you’re normally doing.”
Sally stood up with a grunt. She dusted her palms on her apron and studied Melissa over the rim of her reading glasses. “Like what Winnie let you do?”
“Winnie told you.”
“Winnie tells me everything when she wants it known.”
“The rest of the town?”
“A few. Enough. You’ve been making yourself interesting, Melissa.”
She didn’t know what to do with that. She set the camera bag on the counter. “The photos won’t go anywhere you don’t approve. I’ll show you everything I take. Anything you don’t like, it’s gone.”
“You don’t need to go through all that. I trust Winnie’s judgment on people.”
“I’d rather go through all that.”
Sally looked at her a second longer, then gave a short nod. “All right. But you’ll catch me in whatever apron I’ve got on. I don’t do touch-ups.”
“No touch-ups.”
Sally turned back to the shelves. Melissa lifted the camera.
The store had looked disorganized for as long as Melissa had been coming in, but she’d learned it was disorganized on purpose.
Every jar, every candle, and every hand-lettered sign had a place.
The pencil behind Sally’s ear had a place.
The clipboard on the counter with yesterday’s orders had a place.
Melissa caught her reaching up to the top shelf.
Caught her writing on the clipboard with her glasses sliding down her nose.
Caught her standing still for a second at the front window with the morning light falling across her cheek while she watched someone walk past. That was the frame Melissa knew she’d keep.
Sally looking out, not performing. The store around her like a lived-in photograph already.
Two older women came in. Sally turned toward them, and the moment ended.
Melissa slipped the camera back in the bag. “Thank you.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I need.”
“Hmm.” Sally adjusted her glasses. “You work fast.”
“I work quiet.”
“Same thing, in the right hands.”
Melissa let herself smile on the way out the door.
Bryan was harder.
Not because of Bryan. Because the Sandpiper kitchen at ten in the morning was a small, busy, hot room with three people moving in choreographed circles around each other, and Melissa didn’t want to be the woman standing in the corner with a camera while somebody carried a hot pan around her.
She knocked on the back door. Bryan poked his head out with a streak of flour across one forearm.
“What’s up?”
“Quick question. Are you in the middle of something I would make worse?”
“Always. Come in.”
She stepped inside. Heat hit her first, then the smell of butter and yeast and something citrusy. A cook was at the stove. Another worker was unloading a rack of dishes with his back to them. Bryan went back to a bowl of dough and pressed the heel of his hand into it.
“Bryan, I’m doing a portrait series. I’d like to photograph you working. Not posed, nothing fancy. I won’t get in your way and I’ll leave when you say leave. If you don’t want to, say no. It won’t be weird.”
Bryan didn’t look up from the dough. “Cassidy told me you’d probably come around.”
“Of course she did.”
“She said to say yes.”
“Cassidy doesn’t get to decide that for you.”
He looked up then. The flour had made its way from his forearm to his cheekbone. “I know. That’s why I’m saying yes. Because you just told me I didn’t have to.”
Melissa had her camera out of the bag before he finished the sentence.
She took the first frame of his hands in the dough, thumbprint-sized dimples in the pale surface where he’d worked it.
She took another of him turning to his cook with a question, dough still on his fingers.
She got one of him reading a recipe card, his brow pulled together in the same expression he wore when Cassidy proposed something he didn’t like.
She stayed fifteen minutes. When she got ready to leave, Bryan was folding herbs into a compound butter with the side of a knife. He didn’t stop. He just lifted his chin at her in a small salute.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You bet.”
She walked home along the seawall with her camera bag against her hip and her head still in the three workspaces she’d just stood inside.
Permission. She kept coming back to it the whole walk home.
She’d spent two years thinking about the photograph of Maria LaBelle.
Replayed the hurricane morning more times than she could count.
Rehearsed the apologies she couldn’t deliver and the explanations that wouldn’t have made it better.
She’d looked at the picture of Maria’s hand on the back of her son’s head and known, with a clarity that had shut her down for two years, that she had never once stopped to ask.
Or to help. Too busy taking photographs.
And she’d never forgiven herself for that.
She’d lifted the camera and taken the shot and told herself the storm was the reason.
This morning she’d asked three people and all three had said yes. She wasn’t sure which part she was more afraid of. The asking. Or the yes.
She unlocked the door of Captain’s Watch, set the camera bag on the kitchen table, and stood for a long moment looking at it.
Then she pulled out the chair, sat down, and slipped the memory card into the laptop.
The first files came up in the preview grid view on the screen.
Jan at the machine. Jan laughing. Sally at the window. Sally writing on the clipboard. Bryan’s hands in the dough. Bryan’s face at the phone. Frame after frame of people she’d known at the edge of her life for months and who, in the space of one morning, had let her stand close enough to see them.
She scrolled slowly. She didn’t touch the exposure. She didn’t crop. She wanted to see what the camera had seen before she got her hands on it.
The difference from her architectural work was almost embarrassing, now that the two sets sat in the same folder tree. The buildings had been technically correct. Well-lit, and cleanly framed. The work of a skilled technician.
These were the work of someone who’d been let in.
She kept scrolling.
A knock came at the door.
She glanced at the clock on the stove. Almost noon. She hadn’t eaten.
“It’s open.”
Clint stepped inside with a tool bag over one shoulder. He looked at the laptop, then at her, then at the laptop again.
“Winnie said your bedroom window’s stuck.”
“Right. Yes. Sorry. It’s been stuck for a week. I kept forgetting to mention it.”
“She mentioned it for you.”
“Of course she did.”
He set the tool bag down on the floor and headed for the bedroom. Melissa heard him wrestle with the sash. Then he said something under his breath that she didn’t quite catch. Finally, the scrape of something being worked loose. She turned back to the laptop.
A few minutes later he came back through the kitchen.
“Needs a new sash cord. I’ll come back this afternoon.”
“Thank you.”
He didn’t leave. He was looking at the laptop screen over her shoulder, and didn’t pretend he wasn’t.
Her hand moved toward the lid. She left it open.
“Jan,” he said. “At Harbor Brew.”
“From this morning.”
He didn’t answer. He stepped closer, and she angled the screen slightly so he could see.
She scrolled through the morning. Jan. Sally. Bryan. He looked at each frame without comment. She’d stopped breathing somewhere around the third image, waiting.
When she reached the end, he was still quiet. His hand was on the back of her chair, not touching her, and she could smell faint sawdust and coffee on him.
“These are different,” he said.
She went still. Waited for these are posed. These are too intimate. You’re doing what you said you wouldn’t do. Any version of the verdict she’d been writing herself at three in the morning for two weeks.
“These are good.” He paused. “Really good.”
She swallowed. “Thank you.”
“I mean it. The one of Bryan’s hands. And the one where Sally’s looking out the window. Those are…” He didn’t finish. He took his hand off the back of her chair. “They’re yours. In a way the lighthouse shots weren’t.”
“What do you mean, mine?”
He looked at her. “The lighthouse shots could have been made by anybody who knew how to expose a photograph. These couldn’t.”
She’d expected a shrug. Maybe a nod. Not that.
“Clint.”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll be back around three with the cord.”
He picked up the tool bag and headed for the door. He paused with his hand on the knob.
“Who’s next?”
“What?”
“On your list.”
She looked at the laptop. At the folder still open. At the names she hadn’t crossed off yet.
“Cassidy, probably. Then Emily.”
He nodded once, slowly.
“And then?”
She didn’t answer. She watched the back of his head, the line of his shoulders, and the door frame he was almost through. It would make a great shot. Instead all she said was, “I’ll think about who’s next.”
He didn’t turn around. He stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him.
Melissa sat at the kitchen table with the laptop open and the afternoon sun falling across the top of Bryan’s dough on the screen.
She reached out and clicked the arrow key once, and Jan’s braid filled the frame.
She clicked again, and Sally was looking out the store window.
She clicked until she landed on the frame of Jan laughing at a customer’s joke with her head thrown back and her whole face unguarded.
She dragged it into the Portraits folder. Then added one of Sally and one of Bryan.