5. Aria
ARIA
Bev at the cafe asked if I take pictures of weddings, and I said only other people's, which got a bigger laugh than I meant it to.
She'd asked not two minutes after I sat down, in the direct way small towns ask personal questions, like the answer might change her whole afternoon. The whole cafe laughed along with her, including two men in flannel by the window who hadn't been part of the conversation until that exact moment.
Bev was somewhere north of sixty, reading glasses on a beaded chain, a laugh that filled the room before you'd finished the joke.
She refilled my coffee without asking and leaned both elbows on the counter like she had all morning to spend on me, which, this being Cedar Cove on an ordinary weekday morning, she probably did.
"You're the photographer everybody's talking about," she said. "Rosalind's niece."
"That's me. Guilty on both counts."
"She'd be tickled you're using the place. She always said the light in that garden was something special." Bev topped off my cup again, though I hadn't asked.
"You're doing the tourism board thing? Whole town's been waiting on new photos since the old ones went up sometime during the last administration."
"It's six weeks. Landmarks, local businesses, whatever makes people want to detour off the highway."
"Well, you'll want the marina at sunrise, and Old Man Terry's boat if he'll let you near it, which he won't, and the gazebo in the square, obviously. Everybody wants the gazebo." She said it like she'd been rehearsing the list for weeks, which, knowing Bev after ten minutes, she probably had.
"And don't let anybody tell you the diner's more photogenic than my counter. That's slander."
"Noted. I'll get your good side."
"Honey, I only have good sides." She wiped the counter, which didn't need wiping. I was starting to understand that was just what her hands did while she worked up to the real question.
"And I hear you already met Jake Hartley. Practically landed on him, from what I heard."
"It was an accident involving gravity and a poorly maintained sprinkler system. I'd hardly call it landing on him."
"That's not how Deacon tells it."
"Deacon wasn't there."
"Deacon doesn't need to be there. That man could narrate a sunrise and make it sound like gossip." She smiled like she'd already decided something about me and was simply waiting for me to catch up.
"He's a good one, you know. Jake. Quiet, but good."
"I wasn't asking."
"Didn't say you were. Just mentioning it, the way a person mentions the weather." Her smile said the weather had never once been just the weather in the history of Cedar Cove.
I paid for my coffee and a muffin I didn't need and let myself out before she could mention the weather again.
The tourism board office turned out to be a converted storefront two doors down, run by a woman named Ellen who talked in exclamation points even when her sentences didn't earn them.
She handed me a laminated shot list and a town map with landmarks circled in a color she called Cedar Cove Green, which was, as far as I could tell, just green.
"The marina's gorgeous at sunrise," Ellen said. "The gazebo's our bread and butter, every brochure needs the gazebo. And if you can get the old mill without the dumpster in frame, you'll be my hero for life."
"I'll do my best to avoid the dumpster."
"That's all any of us can do." She said it with the weary conviction of someone who'd fought that particular battle before and lost.
"We tried hiring someone out of the city two years ago. He charged us triple and gave us a dumpster in every single shot. Artistic vision, he called it."
"I promise not to have artistic vision about your dumpster."
"That's exactly what I needed to hear." Ellen beamed at me like I'd solved a problem that had been keeping her up nights, and from the look of the folder she handed me next, maybe it had.
"Portfolio's gorgeous, by the way. I looked you up before the interview. Very impressive for someone with a five-year-old."
"The five-year-old is why the portfolio's impressive. Nothing sharpens your timing like shooting around nap schedules."
I spent the morning working through her list with Lily trailing behind me in rubber boots two sizes too big, narrating everything she saw like a very small, very confident tour guide.
Old Man Terry turned out to be exactly the character Bev had promised, weathered and suspicious of cameras in the specific way of a man who'd been photographed against his will more than once.
He let me shoot his boat from the dock, grudgingly, after Lily informed him with total sincerity that I was the best photographer in the whole world and possibly the universe.
"That so," he said, looking at her instead of me, the way most people did within thirty seconds of meeting Lily.
"She's not wrong," I said. "I'm very good at my job."
"World's a pretty big place for a five-year-old to be so sure about."
"She's sure about most things. It's a phase I'm told ends around thirty."
That got something close to a laugh out of him, gravelly and reluctant, and he waved me off toward the far side of the dock where the light was better anyway.
Lily informed a golden retriever tied up nearby that it was allowed to be in my shot, and negotiated, unprompted, a brief truce between herself and a goose that seemed to feel strongly about its territory near the gazebo.
The goose won. The goose always won.
I dropped her at the library's morning story circle a little before noon, promised I'd be back by lunch, and spent the rest of the day working like I used to before Lily, before any of it, chasing light down side streets and crouching in flowerbeds for an angle nobody but me would ever care about.
It felt like coming back to a language I'd half forgotten I spoke fluently.
Somewhere around the third roll of the old mill, dumpster carefully cropped out per Ellen's instructions, I caught myself thinking that this was the first paying work I'd done under my own name since I'd started raising Lily on my own, the first contract that hadn't come filtered through somebody else's connections or somebody else's guilt.
Six weeks, a modest fee, and full creative control over which angle made a hundred-year-old brick building look like something worth a family detouring off the highway for.
It shouldn't have felt like this much, and it did anyway.
I texted the finished files to Ellen from a bench outside the mill, three hundred frames whittled down to the forty best, and got back a string of exclamation points that told me everything I needed to know about how the job was going.
Lily fell asleep in the car on the way home, like she always did after a big morning, and woke up just long enough to inform me that Old Man Terry's boat was named Second Wind and that she had personally decided this was the best name for a boat she had ever heard, better even than the goose, who she'd also decided deserved a name, though she hadn't settled on one yet.
"Maybe he already has a name," I said. "Geese usually do."
"Not this one. He looked nameless."
"That's a very specific thing to look."
"I know things," she said, with the total confidence of a person who had lived on this earth for exactly five years, and then she was asleep again before I could ask what else she knew.
By the time I'd fed her and gotten her down for a nap, the light outside had gone that particular gold it only goes right before evening, and I sat on my own porch steps with a glass of water and the specific satisfaction of a day that had gone entirely according to plan for once.
Somewhere on the other side of the fence, a lawnmower started, ran for exactly one confused minute, and quit again, and I decided that was somebody else's problem to solve.
My phone rang before I'd finished the water. It was Mom.
"You've been ignoring my calls," she said, no hello, the same greeting she'd been using since I got my first cell phone.
"I've been unpacking a house and starting a job, Mom. I haven't been ignoring you."
"That's what ignoring looks like from the inside. How's my granddaughter?"
"Thriving. She's already adopted the neighbor's kid as her best friend and negotiated shared custody of an apple tree."
"She gets that from me." Diane said it with the easy confidence of a woman who had never once doubted her own influence on the family gene pool. "How's the job going?"
"It's good, but long. I photographed a marina, a gazebo, and one extremely uncooperative goose today."
"Did the goose win?"
"The goose always wins."
She laughed, the real one, not the polite one she saved for people she was still deciding about, and something in my chest loosened like it always did when I made my mother laugh for real.
"And how's Lily settling in? Does she miss the city at all?"
"She misses the pizza place on the corner. She has not once mentioned missing the actual apartment."
"Smart girl. And you? Are you settling in, or are you still doing that thing where you tell everyone you're fine until you actually are?"
"I'm doing the thing where I'm actually fine, Mom. It's been six days. Give it a chance."
"I'm allowed to worry. It's in the job description." A pause, the particular quality of a pause I'd learned to recognize as my mother deciding how to ask something without seeming like she was asking it.
"Are you seeing anyone? Or thinking about it, even a little?"
I took a slow sip of water I didn't need, buying myself half a second I didn't have.
"I've been here less than a week. I've met a goose, a grumpy fisherman, and my next door neighbor, who mostly measures things and doesn't talk."
"That sounds promising already."
"It sounds like a man with a tape measure and strong opinions about fruit trees, which is not the same as promising."
"Give it time. You always did like a project."
"I have a five-year-old and a six-week photography contract. I am not taking on a man as a hobby."
"I found a box of your father's things out in the garage," she said, once the laugh had settled.
"Old photographs, mostly. There's one of you from that summer at the lake, the one before your senior year of college. You look about fifteen pounds of trouble and entirely too pleased with yourself."
"Which lake?"
"Millbrook. You don't remember Millbrook?"
Something in me went very still, the kind of still I hadn't examined too closely in six years, and I was grateful she couldn't see my face over the phone.
"I remember it," I said carefully. "In pieces."
"You were inseparable from that boy the whole summer. What was his name? I can never keep it straight, and your father would have known. He never forgot a single name in his whole life, that man."
"I don't remember either," I said, easy and immediate, the kind of lie that comes out before you've decided to tell it.
Diane made a small, satisfied sound and moved right on, never one to linger once a subject stopped holding her attention.
"Well, it doesn't matter. You two were sweet together. Summer romance, over before the leaves turned, typical for that age."
Papers shuffled on her end, a life lived in the background noise of someone always doing three things at once. Then, casual as anything, the way she asked about the weather or the price of gas, she asked the question that undid the whole calm evening in one sentence.
"You ever think about tracking down that Millbrook boy?" Mom asked, like she hadn't just aimed straight for the one nerve I'd spent six years numbing.
I hung up before she could ask anything else. There he was on my roof, uninvited, like the universe has a sense of humor I do not appreciate.