by Jenny Hale
With the camera in hand, Hallie headed back out to the yard. But as she neared the others, Uncle Hank stood up and lost his balance. Ben and Sydney had their backs to him, Robby’s laughing like an eerie echo in the silence of motion as Hallie started to run. She dropped her camera, pushing her muscles as far as they’d go. “Ben!” she called, just as Uncle Hank hit the ground.
Ben rushed over to him and started to help him up. Hallie reached them and put her hands on her knees, gasping to catch her breath.
“I lost my balance,” Uncle Hank said, clearly stunned by his fall. He stumbled toward the chair that had turned over, the empty beer bottle in the grass, but Ben stopped him.
“I’ll get it,” he said. “Just hold on to me for a second.”
Sydney hurried over and righted the chair.
“Does anything hurt? Are you in pain anywhere?” Ben asked.
“I can’t live without her,” Uncle Hank said without warning, ignoring Ben’s efforts to assess the situation. Uncle Hank looked at all of them, his eyes pleading, but there was nothing they could do to help him with this. “I’m falling apart now that she’s gone. What’s the purpose in me staying behind? So I can just exist in a chair somewhere?” His eyes filled with tears. “I’m trying, but I just don’t see the point in sticking around.”
Hallie’s moment of hope slid away from her. Uncle Hank didn’t see the point in living. That was a horrible thought.
“If you’re still here,” Sydney said frankly, “then you’re needed. We need you. We couldn’t cope with both of you gone. You have to help us all.”
“I can’t help you,” he said, dejected.
The man who could always fix everything couldn’t fix this. He was broken himself. And Hallie knew that if they all allowed themselves to think too much about Aunt Clara, they’d be just as broken. How does a family move on after someone so important leaves it?
* * *
“You doing okay?” Ben said, peeking out onto the screened porch of the guesthouse.
Hallie held her phone in her hand, the rippling gulf only calming her slightly. She’d texted Mama after she’d returned from the doctor with Uncle Hank, but hadn’t heard back. Uncle Hank wanted to be alone, and Sydney had taken Robby to get some lunch in town. So, while Ben made a few work calls, Hallie had gotten her book and settled on the porch.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He was in fresh clothes, his hair combed, his face clean-shaven. “I have to go out for a little bit. I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything.”
“Is it something I can help with?”
“No. You just sit back and enjoy the sunshine. You can read your book—what are you reading?”
Hallie held it up and he broke out into a huge smile. “The Art of Photography.”
She allowed the small moment of amusement to pass between them. She’d packed the book with an eye roll but now it seemed to be calling her. “I go back and forth with that list, but in a weird way, I feel like it brings me closer to Aunt Clara whenever I consider it again. I just wish I could’ve talked to her about it. I’d have done anything she wanted me to do—but it would’ve been nice if she’d told me why.”
“Perhaps the why isn’t as important as the journey.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“I can feel it, Hallie.” Then, with that grin she’d seen so many times, the one that he seemed to save just for her, he said, “Back in a bit.”
Not wanting to pry, she wondered where he was going, but didn’t press him any further. “Okay. See ya,” she said.
With a wave, Ben shut the door and Hallie texted her mother again.
No answer.
She opened her photography book and tried to focus on the pages in front of her, but her mind was on a million other things. She closed it and decided to head into the cottage to see if she could talk to Uncle Hank. She was worried about him after his fall, and wanted to see if he was all right. And maybe, if she could get him talking, he could offer some direction in all this. The two of them thinking together might just crack Aunt Clara’s code and help Hallie to understand what Aunt Clara really wanted from her. Hallie was hopeful they could.
NINE
Hallie picked up her camera and her sketchbook and took them with her as she walked to the main house. A gull flew overhead, and instinctively, she pulled the camera up to her eye, the feeling of it in her hands like tangible nostalgia. As a girl, she was rarely without it, catching so many shots of her childhood that if she ever organized all the photos, she could have her entire autobiography in vivid color.
She pointed it at the bird and clicked, then held it out to view the digital picture. Capturing an image and freezing it in time, the light coming in just right, the angles perfect—it was as uniquely satisfying as it had been for her so long ago.
She couldn’t remember the day she’d set her camera down for the last time, or when she’d boxed it up with her drawings and shoved them in the top of her closet, but just this one image made her wonder why she had. She pointed it at the restless gulf and snapped another shot. When she’d reached the porch, the sight of Aunt Clara’s rocking chair caught her eye, that familiar void coming back. She turned her camera toward it and took a photo. The image was hauntingly clear on her screen. Hallie crouched down on the top of the porch steps and opened her sketchpad, drawing the chair in the same light she’d just found in her photo. She imagined the chair with the birds she’d seen carved into the back of it. Her pencil moving effortlessly, she dug the lead into the page, carving the birds out on the back of the rocker.
Hallie remembered sitting on these steps doing the same thing when Aunt Clara was alive. The two of them would sketch out designs, and while Aunt Clara was actually working, Hallie would pretend she was too. “Make sure you find a job that doesn’t feel like work,” Aunt Clara would tell her. “That’s how you know you’re where you belong.” Hallie looked down at the chair she’d drawn, thinking about her job right now at the advertising agency.
With a deep breath, she closed her sketchpad and went inside.
“Uncle Hank!” she called into the quiet.
His voice sailed in from the kitchen. “I’m in here.”
He was sitting at the table, facing the window with the view of the water outside. How long had he been sitting there alone? Hallie set her drawing pad on the counter and took a seat beside him. He looked down at the camera in her lap.
“The old thing still works?”
Hallie turned it around and clicked through the digital images she’d captured on her way in, so he could see them.
“Looks like you still work too,” he said, allowing himself a smile.
“Would this qualify me as a photographer?” she teased.
He chuckled. “I believe it does. But your Aunt Clara and I had long talks about your talent, and she was always baffled as to why you never put it to use. I think that might have been what she was hoping for.”
“I miss her,” Hallie admitted.
Uncle Hank looked back out the window, his expression contemplative.
“I notice the emptiness without her.”
Uncle Hank didn’t speak for a couple of breaths and he wiped a tear that had escaped from his eye. “I reached for her hand last night in bed, and it wasn’t there. I’ve reached for her hand every night, for fifty years.” His lips wobbled and he cleared his throat.
Hallie got up and wrapped her arms around his neck, embracing him tightly. “Aunt Clara told me that you used to steal the covers,” she said, in hopes that sharing their feelings might help them both.
Uncle Hank rolled his eyes, his playful side taking over. “She claimed I stole the covers as a reason to yank them all to her side, so I suppose that I did steal the covers, in her mind, since apparently they all belonged to her.”
Hallie laughed. When she did, Uncle Hank laughed too and she quickly picked up her camera and snapped a
shot. Uncle Hank didn’t seem to mind.
She showed it to him.
“You could work for magazines with shots like that. You need to be doing something creative. Why are you working as a receptionist at that advertising agency?”
“I’m not a receptionist. I’m a project manager and it’s a creative job. I’ve had a hand in some very large projects,” she said, her defensiveness coming through when she hadn’t meant it to.
She liked her job. It was interesting, and the people were great. She actually had a few projects that had piled up that she was excited about. Her boss really believed in her creative vision, and sometimes she was able to offer sketches and ideas in the design meetings. He’d even let her manage a few large-scale displays around Nashville. She had a nice little set of ideas started for a new venture with Crystal Water, a bottled water company and one of their biggest clients, even though she was leaving them behind unfinished at the moment, her coworker Stacy taking care of what she could for the next two weeks in Hallie’s absence.
Having work made her feel needed, and it squashed the guilt she’d always felt for dropping her great aunt’s name into the conversation during the interview. Aunt Clara, a well-known figure in the design world, would never allow any of her family members to use her as a reference. Aunt Clara had started her company from ground zero, using her own hard-earned money, and she didn’t believe in raising her family in privilege. While she’d never let them fall, she wouldn’t allow them to take the easy road either.
“Life is what you make it,” she’d say, “not what I make it. Your life is a blank slate. Dream it up just the way you want it, and then go get it. It’s your own masterpiece to create.”
Working at Willis Advertising wasn’t what Hallie would call a masterpiece-move, but did anyone really have a job like Aunt Clara’s? Not many. It was just like her to romanticize life, because that was how she lived it. They should all be that lucky.
In the end, Hallie had settled for the life of a regular person, a nine-to-five of mediocrity that gave her enough money to enjoy herself and let off steam on the weekends. But there was a tiny piece of her that always wondered what else was out there, and being near Aunt Clara made her hope that some of that magic her aunt had would penetrate the air around Hallie and send something special her way. When Aunt Clara died, any likelihood of magic had dried up right on the spot.
“It never even occurred to me to be a photographer.”
“Clearly it did. It was on your list.”
“I made that list one Saturday when I was bored. And I was twelve! My interests had changed completely by the next day. I probably wanted to be an astronaut after that. Good thing I didn’t write the list that day.”
That made him laugh.
“That’s what makes this so frustrating. Aunt Clara is holding me to something I never even intended to be a permanent thought. Being a photographer was just a schoolgirl whim.”
“Or the tiny seed of a dream that had yet to be dreamt.”
Hallie looked back down at the image on her camera, and it was as if someone else had taken it. She didn’t want to admit that Uncle Hank might be right. She scrolled through the others she’d taken on the way over. She didn’t have technical skills. She hadn’t even taken a photography class. How was she to know if she was any good? What if she put herself out there and everyone could see her inexperience right away?
“I’m an amateur,” she said.
“That’s how everyone begins, Hallie.” He leaned into her view. “Aunt Clara was a designer. She knows design when she sees it, and she was adamant that you have talent, but not just in photography. You’re a creative just like her. That’s why the two of you were inseparable—you had a different way of seeing things, an unspoken understanding of one another.”
Hallie knew he was right. “Will you teach me how to build a sandcastle?” she asked.
It was then that Uncle Hank grinned just like he used to, a wide, endearing smile that spread across his face. “Of course.”
* * *
“Where have you been?” Hallie asked Mama when she finally emerged on the back porch of Starlight. She was holding an envelope. “I was starting to worry.”
“I was…” Mama’s attention was on Uncle Hank, who had spent the last hour on the porch with Hallie. He’d opened up a little, and talking to Hallie seemed to lift his spirits, but Mama coming in had changed his demeanor. “May I speak to you for a second?”
Hallie stood up and followed her mom into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them. “Is something wrong?”
Her mother set the envelope on the table, and cut the plastic wrapping off a bouquet of flowers she must have picked up at the market. She dumped the old baby’s breath from the table’s centerpiece, rinsed out the vase, and started arranging the new blooms into it. “I never said anything to you growing up, but remember how Aunt Clara always left an empty seat and place setting at the table at Thanksgiving? Did you ever notice that? Even when we had so many people we had to push tables together, there was always an empty seat.” She snipped the end off of a daisy and threaded it through the other greenery in the vase.
It hadn’t occurred to Hallie before, but now that Mama mentioned it, she did remember that.
“Uncle Hank gave me another letter addressed to me when we got here. Inside were directions to pass this along.” Mama slid the envelope across the table to Hallie before she started searching the cabinets, eventually pulling out a second vase.
Hallie opened the letter inside and read Aunt Clara’s script, addressed to Lewis Eubanks. “Who is Lewis Eubanks?”
“I asked Uncle Hank and he wouldn’t say anything, but I could tell he knew exactly who it was, and he got really angry. In my whole life, I’ve never seen him like that. I was glad when Ben came to ask him to hang the swing because it cut the tension in the room. I left right away and stayed out of his way until I felt like I’d given him enough time to get over it.” She plunged a few small flowers into the second vase.
“I don’t understand.”
“In the letter accompanying this one, Aunt Clara told me she saved a seat for him every Thanksgiving and that we have to find him. He must have meant a lot to her. She’s left him a hundred thousand dollars and a second letter that’s locked in the safe.”
“Oh my gosh.” That was a lot of money. This Lewis had to be family—he and Hank shared a last name. And he must be close family or Aunt Clara wouldn’t have expected him to come to Thanksgiving. “Why wouldn’t Uncle Hank tell you who he was?” Hallie placed the letter back on the table.
“I don’t know. He clammed right up and just kept shaking his head with his jaw clamped shut.” Mama looked back down at the envelope. “He seemed so bothered by it that I didn’t press him any further. But you know that Aunt Clara only left letters and inheritance payouts to her immediate family.”
That was true. Hallie’s mother had been renting a farmhouse outside of Nashville; the lease had the option to purchase. She’d rented with the intention of saving up her money and buying it one day. With the inheritance, she’d be able to do that now. She dreamed of filling the front porch, overlooking a neighbor’s horse farm, with a large family. Hallie couldn’t understand it. Robby’s father had left Sydney, surprising them all, and plans for Hallie’s impending nuptials had fallen apart, so the outlook of big family gatherings on the old porch wasn’t very promising. But it was just like her mother to plan for the best-case scenario.
Sydney had been left a large sum of money as well, and while Hallie hadn’t read what was in her sister’s letter from Aunt Clara, she did know that her aunt had left some pretty inspirational words—Sydney gave her two weeks’ notice at the law firm where she worked as a paralegal without anything else lined up.
Robby was given funds with explicit instructions for Sydney on how to create an account and when to invest through a college savings plan.
Which left Hallie, and she was still waiting to find out what Clara
had left for her once she completed her list.
“I’ve been in town, seeing if anyone knew Lewis Eubanks, but I couldn’t find anyone who did.”
“Wes doesn’t know?”
“Nope.”
“That’s so strange… Do you think he’s a long-lost cousin or something? I’ve never even heard Uncle Hank mention him.”
“No idea. I wondered the same… It’s probably best that we let it go for now because it only seems to upset Uncle Hank, and he has enough already to make him emotional. Maybe we can find this Lewis quietly and just pass along the money. I’ll call the lawyer tomorrow and find out the best way to do that.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
She handed the smaller vase to Hallie. “You can put this in the guesthouse,” she said. “How is Uncle Hank?” Mama nodded toward the door.
“I made him smile.”
The tension in Mama’s face melted and happiness washed over it. “That’s great, Hallie. If anyone can lift his mood, it’s you. I’m so glad you decided to come.”
“Me too.” And she meant it.
TEN
Hallie lay on the sofa in the guesthouse. The sun had almost completely disappeared behind the horizon, but she hadn’t turned the lights on just yet. She rotated her camera toward the bay window and snapped a picture, Mama’s vase of flowers she’d put on the counter shadowed against the purple sky. Happy with the outcome, she set the camera on the coffee table.
But then she narrowed her eyes and picked it back up, a tingle of worry sliding down her spine. Squinting at the screen, she saw the dark image of a person, way out by the beach. Hallie got up and ran to the window, comparing her photo with the view. It was definitely the outline of a person, but now whoever it was had gone. Could it have been Ben? she wondered. But he wouldn’t be coming home via the beach at the back of the property, unless he’d decided to walk in from town, taking the path that ran along the coast.