Chapter One #2
A three-legged Blue Heeler trotted around the far corner of the house, sniffed my flats with the thoroughness of an investigator running a full background check, and sat down at my left side.
He looked up at me with the settled, purposeful expression of a dog who'd already reached a conclusion and was simply waiting on me to catch up.
"That's Sarge," Stoney said. "Looks like he's adopted you."
Sarge didn't contradict this.
Tent #4 had canvas walls, a real bed, genuine linens, a zipper with complaints, and the same temperature as outside, which made sense because it was made of canvas and had strong opinions about ambient heat.
I unpacked the backup drives, squared up the lens cloths, and had just determined that six batteries and two camera bodies could coexist in one bag with strategic packing when I thought to ask about the bathroom.
The answer was: a luxury restroom trailer, past the second catering tent, about three minutes on foot.
Running water, functioning showers, fresh flowers on the vanity counter.
I was told this as though it was good news.
It was, technically — I'd half-expected a portable toilet situation, so the flowers were a pleasant surprise.
It was also two hundred yards away in the dark, over terrain I hadn't fully mapped yet, past at least one animal population whose nighttime habits remained unknown.
I filed this under things I had agreed to before fully understanding the terms.
My phone rang. Olivia.
"Mrs. Whitestone is threatening to pull the Persian booking," she said. "She says postponing three weeks is—"
"Tell her the Persian is a priority and I'll call Tuesday."
"She says Tuesday—"
"Olivia." I looked at the canvas ceiling. "Tell her I'm in Texas. Tell her the wait list is nine months. Tell her whatever version of that makes her feel most valued."
A pause. "Are you okay? You sound outdoorsy."
"I'm in a tent. I'm fine."
I hung up and went to work.
Texas light in early May wasn't what Manhattan had prepared me for.
I read light automatically: direction, quality, angle, temperature.
The light over The Last Resort came in warm and direct and completely uninterested in negotiating with anyone.
It hit the bluebonnets in the ceremony meadow at the angle that makes flowers look like they know exactly what they're doing.
I photographed for forty minutes and by the twenty-fifth frame I already had the cover of the venue's next five years of marketing materials.
The mini donkey fell in behind me at the twenty-minute mark. I gave it a look. It concluded I had nothing useful to offer and kept following anyway.
I was going to have to add the mini donkey to the list.
I was swapping a memory card near the catering tent when a pink rhinestone cowboy boot appeared in my peripheral vision, followed rapidly by the rest of Caprice Hightower: Bobbie-Jean's twelve-year-old sister, in a high side ponytail with a bow the approximate size of a dinner plate, hot pink and bedazzled and completely committed, and a head-to-toe ensemble in coordinated pastels that appeared to be constructed entirely of rhinestones.
The boots matched the bow. The bow matched the belt.
The belt matched the purse, a small quilted pink thing with a rhinestone clasp, and the purse matched, somehow, the two dogs she had arranged under her arms: Chanel, a Pomeranian in a pink rhinestone harness, and Birkin, a Chihuahua in a matching lavender version, both of them regarding the situation with the glazed serenity of animals who had made their peace with it.
"Oh my God," Caprice said, making direct eye contact.
"You're the pet photographer. I'm Caprice.
I have forty-seven thousand followers." She did not say this like she was bragging.
She said it like it was information I would need in order to make a sound decision.
"Can we do a TikTok? I'm documenting the whole weekend for my series. "
"I love that idea," I said, in the register that meant not today, not tomorrow, not in any future I could currently map. "Once I've got my establishing frames locked, I'll come find you."
Caprice considered this. Birkin shivered. Chanel assessed me with the flat professional gaze of a dog who had sat for more portrait sessions than most photographers I knew.
"Okay," Caprice said. "But I want at least three good angles." She walked away, rhinestones catching the afternoon light in every direction at once.
I had no intention of finding Caprice later.
DUTCH HAD CHANGED FOR dinner.
My neck went warm before anything else had time to process the information. He was in dark-wash jeans and a crisp white button-down with the collar open, hair dry now, no hat, and I found my seat across the table and reminded myself I was here on a job.
The dinner wasn't what any version of Texas I'd been able to form opinions about had prepared me for.
Smokestack Earl (a celebrity pitmaster, Bobbie-Jean had mentioned, flown in from Lockhart) had delivered a whole hog on a spit and three kinds of sausage and ribs you ate with your hands, all of it served by starched-white catering staff on Lenox china at a sixty-foot communal table, longneck Lone Stars sitting side by side with champagne flutes.
The gap between those two objects was a complete composition.
Dutch asked about my work sometime after the first course. Real questions, the kind with actual space in them for an answer — what made pet photography different from portrait work generally, and nobody I'd worked with or been friends with or dated had ever thought to ask me that.
I told him about the Persian. The Tribeca loft.
The Hermès carrier, formally declared sovereign territory and not to be surrendered on any terms I was authorized to offer.
The forty-five minutes I'd spent on the floor narrating a story about a fictional mouse to an animal I was increasingly certain understood English and had simply reviewed my arguments and found them insufficient.
The eventual, diplomatic emergence. The cat settling on my knee with the expression of a manager extending a probationary period rather than committing to a decision.
This story had received polite appreciation at four Manhattan dinner parties.
At a table in a Texas field with a celebrity pitmaster's ribs in front of me, it was apparently very funny.
I was laughing before I'd finished telling it.
Dutch laughed differently than he had at the fence post, quieter, like he'd been caught mid-thought.
My dimples don't happen on purpose. They've been there since birth and I've been aware of them since seventh grade, when Tyler Fitch announced their existence to thirty-two twelve-year-olds during a fire drill, and I spent two years after that developing what I consider adequate control.
They show up only when a laugh catches me before I can manage it.
Dutch saw them.
His face did a small, involuntary thing. His eyes dropped, then came back. He didn't look somewhere else after that, and I gave my dinner plate my full professional attention.
Later, after Big Jim Hightower made a toast considerably more moving than I'd expected from a man in a bolo tie, Dutch told a story about a horse. Pancake — a retired draft horse he'd gotten as a half-broken three-year-old. Hadn't let a person touch him for the first full year Dutch had him.
"What changed it?" I asked.
"He figured out I wasn't going anywhere," Dutch said.
His face went quiet when he said it. Not staging it — just having it, quiet, nothing put on display. I pay attention to faces when they're not being watched. It's part of the job.
I didn't catch that the story might be about anything other than a horse.
Dutch leaned across to refill my wine. His fingers grazed mine on the stem of the glass, and the heat climbed before I could do a single thing about it — up my neck first, settling hard at my cheekbones, fair skin telling on me in real time.
He wasn't looking away. He was watching it happen, steady and unhurried, and from the small shift in his expression I knew he'd read exactly what it meant.
My hand moved to the hollow at the base of my throat without my permission.
Stoney stood for the best-man rehearsal speech: short, a little devastating about Stoney's taste in horses, generous about his taste in women. The table laughed, the real kind. Dutch sat back down and held my gaze for two counts.
I'd been mid-sentence with Bobbie-Jean. I found the end of it eventually.
The catering crew started clearing. The family drifted toward the house. I excused myself and walked back across the property in the dark.
The sky above The Last Resort wasn't what any city had prepared me for.
I'd spent years outside up there: rooftops, the park, the street at two in the morning.
Whatever I'd been calling the sky, it wasn't this.
No towers to interrupt it. Nothing to soften the edges.
Just actual sky, being completely unreasonable about how many stars it thought the situation required.
I gave it three seconds and kept walking.
Sarge was already posted at the tent flap when I got back, apparently having decided this was his assignment for the duration without consulting me. He met my eyes once, planted himself, and resumed staring into the middle distance with the focus of a professional.
I lay there fully dressed and tried very hard to think about work. Mrs. Whitestone's Persian. The mini donkey, who was getting added whether I'd planned for it or not. Sarge breathed at the flap with the steady competence of someone who had this handled.
The canvas ceiling offered nothing useful.
What it kept coming back to, every single time, was a man at a fence post who'd watched the color climb my face and said absolutely nothing about it, patient and aware, watching me like he already knew what it meant and was in no particular hurry about any of it.
I was in significant trouble.
My apparent new personal watchdog already knew.