25. Twenty-five
Twenty-five
Instead of a set of prints in a leatherbound portfolio, I carry my laptop containing digital files to my latest meeting with Irma.
We sit around a raw-edged, wood slabbed table made by a local craftsman in the front of the gallery, computer open. I suck in a sharp breath and hold it as I click on the file titled Landscapes.
“There aren’t many, but I went to different areas from last time. I think these will be more to your liking.”
She eyes me over the top of her glasses as I click on the first thumbnail.
“You shot more landscapes,” she mutters. “Too stubborn for your own good.”
I force a smile, the four cups of coffee I had this morning seemingly hitting me all at once as my jittery fingers struggle to get the file open.
“Uhh . . . umm. Well . . .” As the files load, I clear my throat, pick at skin on a cuticle until it starts to bleed, then wipe it on my black slacks. “I thought maybe I gave you the wrong impression last time. Of my skills, I mean.”
Her eyes narrow as the image fills the screen. Shot during golden hour, the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains spread out for miles and miles into the horizon, orange glow filling the sky, painting green leaves yellow. I grin. It’s perfect.
Irma looks at me over the black rim of her glasses, annoyed.
My grin flips and stomach plummets.
I click to the next one. A river. The next, a rock face. A waterfall. An empty dock on Lake Ledger.
With every click, her hard expression is steadfast, her silence deafening.
Finally, I can’t take her disappointment.
“You can click,” I mutter, leaving my position from next to her.
Click.
Click.
Click.
She stops, looks at me over the top of the computer, making me realize I’m pacing.
I still.
Swallow.
Smile weakly.
She clicks again.
“There’s another file on here. Nonsense. What is it?”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer before I hear a click.
I laugh softly. “Ah, those aren’t anything. Just stuff I shoot for fun.”
I’m behind her again, looking down at the computer over her shoulder. Despite my warning, the first image loads.
I barely gave these photos a glance when I got them. There was no point. The experimental rolls that Thor tried to eat, and the boys tried to cook, were just for me. Souped, scratched, and scorched. Rolls I shot with unorthodox angles and no regard for technical rules. Photos I made because it’s what I like.
As the first image fills the screen, it’s with an explosion of color. Lots of it.
The image is of a chain-link fence—the one from the baseball field—with sun flare shooting through the linked squares, bursting in the frame. The players are there, but because of the light and the focus, they are blurry blobs on the field. Layered over the image and the perfect golden rays, there’s a bright pink drop dripping across the image. The film soup effect. The mess of motherhood overlapping days spent at a baseball field.
And together, it’s all there. A photo and a tangible memory. An image that feels like life—like so many of my Today’s Bests.
“Ah,” she comments, knowing look covering her features as she moves to the next image. “Tell me about these, June Cannon.”
I laugh at her use of my full name.
“Not much to tell,” I say, looking at the screen. “The woman that owns the florist in town always puts her favorite flowers outside. These—I don’t know what they are—were beautiful, but kind of lonely.” In the photo, there’s a large rack but one lone colorful bouquet. This one didn’t get impacted by the souping, but the colors are nostalgic. An old love story. I shrug. “Anyway, I was just on a walk and . . .”
“It spoke to you,” Irma finishes for me, almost amused.
I nod; she clicks to another image. It’s a double exposure; the first image is the baseball team in the dugout, the second is the people in the stands—their families and friends. Same blobs of color distorting it just enough to make it interesting—make it art.
The next one, the kids playing at the lake, where I shot them from the ledge, making them look like ghosts.
“And this one? What does it make you feel?”
I think of the young mom crying. How lonely she felt. How beautiful the day and lake had been, but despite that beauty she—I—wept.
“Lost,” I admit.
She looks at me, blinks several times, then returns her focus to the screen.
She continues, going through the images of every familiar aspect of my life—every detail that I’ve seen a million times: the little downtown, Life on the Ledge mural, the lake with the morning light dancing off the surface, Scotty’s crematorium, a bar lined with beer at the brewery, the water tower. But they’re different. Colorful. More. Reality but not. Nostalgic. Light leaks rip across some of the photos, sucking me in. It embarrasses me how much I feel every shot in every part of me. How I look at them and see something beautiful, knowing nobody else will.
My chest aches like I’ve had my heart broken. I love them so much it makes me sad.
She clicks through them all, pausing occasionally to look at me before going to the next one. Silent the entire time, glasses perched on the tip of her nose, she’s unreadable. Stoic as she studies the screen.
Again, she pauses, and we look together. The wild card of every roll of film—the final frame. It’s the one Lyra took of Camp and I at the picnic. His arm is around me; I’m leaning against him. His smile is big and lopsided, mine is easy. Pretending . Down the image, there’s a streak of light, like a tail of a comet, then black covers a quarter of the screen. Final frames are just like that, never knowing what will show up or get left out. As if the camera gets to decide what matters.
“What do you feel when you look at these?” she asks, tone firm as she clicks to the next image.
I think of what Reed said. How the right photo would change me. Change the rhythm of my heartbeat, the organization of my DNA.
I study the screen. It’s a shot of long shadows, stretched in the afternoon light. Waves of color from souping mix with stretched lines. My hand holding Ty’s, his holding Hank’s, his holding Lyra’s. The four of us standing in the middle of the sidewalk after a walk. It was a warm day; the ants were hungry little bastards when we went to the park. Hank got a skinned knee, Lyra mostly ignored us listening to music in her earbuds, only pulling them out to ask what was for dinner. We aren’t in the picture—no faces or feet or hands—but the shadows are there. Us in the frame—there but not.
“Life,” I finally say, fizziness popping in my veins. “I feel life when I look at these. It’s messy, imperfect . . . faded even. It’s how you might feel at the end of the day. The best days and the worst ones, all blurred together. And even though the colors are too loud in some of them—out of place almost—that’s also life. Expectations not matching reality. Love and little details.”
She nods, thoughtful, pulling her glasses off her nose and letting them hang from the beaded chain around her neck.
She hates them. That’s the only reason why she would be such a statue.
“But, you know, this file is just-just-just nothing. Experimental. Nonsense. I mean, you should have seen the dog. And my kids! Obviously not as polished as the—”
“Enough!” She holds up a hand. “Dear Lord, don’t argue yourself out of your passion, June. They are perfect if you’ll let them be. Artists have such a way of ruining a good thing. I knew a writer once who did the same damn thing.” She chuckles, shaking her head. “They are good . You should be proud. You weren’t made to photograph waterfalls and desert vistas; you were made for this.” She taps the screen with her fingertip. “For life. For messy. I felt every image. Tasted the ice cream, felt the warmth of the sun”—she presses the back arrow a couple times, stopping at an image—“and every shot of this subject?” She raises her eyebrows.
I’m dizzy at her words. Faint even. I open and close my mouth—twice—no word seeming good enough to say. Because Irma freaking London likes my photos, my photos, and my dream isn’t lost. It’s different, not gone. And the face on the screen . . .
A motorcycle rumbles through the open door, signaling Reed’s arrival as he parks his bike.
“Thank you, Irma.” I look back at the screen. “Seriously.”
She smiles, lifting a piece of paper off the table.
“We’re having a gallery show,” she says at the same time Reed walks through the open doorway, easy smile on his face as he strolls to where we’re sitting. “I want you in it. It’s only two weeks away, but”—she hands me a business card for Piedmont Printers—“you tell them I sent you; they’ll get it done.”
“A gallery show?” I ask, stunned.
Her eyes narrow as she huffs a breath. “Can you not hear things the first time? I said a gallery show,” she snips. “Can you handle it?”
Reed leans over Irma, his intoxicating scent invading my senses as he starts scrolling through the images on my computer. I nod, dumb from the surrealness of what’s happening. “Yes, of course. Right. Sorry. I can handle it.”
“These are good, June,” Reed says, looking over his shoulder at me between frames and clicks. “Damn good. You soup these?”
I think of Hank and Ty literally declaring soup! when I found them in the kitchen and a laugh puffs out of me. “Yes.”
“Raw but happy.” He stops on an image of Camp—the same one Irma stopped on earlier. “Well, maybe not this one.”
“Why not that one?” Irma asks.
Reed looks at me, eyebrow cocked.
My face heats. “That’s my husband.”
“And an ass,” Reed chimes in, amused smile tugging at his lips.
“Ah. Well, a good photo—a real one—never tells a lie.”
“You’re always here,” I say to Reed, both of us leaning against my minivan parked on the street. “What’s the deal? How do you know Irma?”
It’s sunny; the light makes his eyes so bright and flecked in shades of blue it’s hard not to get lost in them.
He looks away, rubbing his forehead, as if deciding how to answer. Or if he will.
He lets out a heavy exhale. “She knew my dad.”
I pause, consider her album of photos.
“Like . . . knew your dad?” I ask, eyes wide.
He snorts a laugh, and it’s an answer without words. They were lovers. It explains how she ended up in Ledger.
I have so many more questions, but all I can manage is: “Whoa.”
I glance toward the gallery. Through the windows, Irma adjusts frames on the wall then stops to talk to a customer, laughing as she points to the wall and sweeps a hand through her short hair. “What happened? Your mom . . . ?”
“Knew,” he fills in. “She loved my dad enough to accept he had fallen in love with Irma. It was . . . weird.” He laughs softly at the shocked expression on my face.
“When?”
“Hmm.” He lifts his scruff-covered chin toward the sky, thinking. “Maybe fifteen years ago. They met—my dad was a writer, you know?” The words Irma had used, I knew a writer once, flutter through me. “Anyway, they met on some assignment. He was writing, she was shooting.” He shrugs. “I was pissed for a while; my mom was hurt. But now, I’ve been in and out of love, I get it. We can’t always control it. Who we love, who we quit. When it happens, what we tolerate. Kinda like a photo, you know? We can shoot with a vision, but ultimately, we’re at the mercy of everything cooperating with us. Light, movement, space . . .” His voice trails off, eyes to the sky for a beat before continuing. “Anyway, I wanted to meet her. So, one day, I did. I was doing a stint in California; she came to a local gallery. I showed up, introduced myself, and became . . . friends.”
“Friends?” I ask, skeptical.
He laughs. “Yes, June, friends . I’m not that bad.”
I look at him, unable to pull my eyes away. Casual grey T-shirt molded to his chest, jeans slung low, lips always on the brink of a smile, saying the words I didn’t know a man knew how to articulate. New. Mysterious. Everything that Camp isn’t.
“June Cannon, I think you’re staring at me,” he teases.
Heat envelops my skin, and I blink away, laughing slightly. “You’re just . . . different. I don’t know. Different.” I brave eye contact, redirecting the conversation. “So your dad loved Irma, Irma loved your dad. Then what?”
He scrubs a hand across his jaw. “When he died, my mom was sitting next to him.”
I nod. Not seeing the full picture but seeing enough of it.
“You have time for a coffee?” he asks.
Yes . I want to say yes. Desperately. I want to sit with Reed and listen to his smooth voice tell me stories of the last twenty-two years of his life and ask me questions that make me feel like I matter. I slip out my phone, check the time; I have two hours until I have to get the boys. That’s plenty of time to get lost in all of him.
Yet, when I open my mouth to agree, I hear myself say, “I can’t.” Then, “Kids.”
And though Reed smiles, his eyes say something else. That he sees my lie.
With a knuckled tap on the roof of the van, he steps away. “Well, I guess I’ll see you when you claim your space in the gallery.”
When I nod, he strolls away, leaving regret-filled knots in my belly the entire drive home.