Jenna paused to make sure her voice wouldn’t break before she spoke. “Did you take this?” She’d never seen any of his work, and yet she felt sure it was his. That he’d been the one to draw such life and light out of this family’s impossible situation.
He joined her in front of the photo. “I did.”
She pointed to a group of acrylics. “What about those?”
He shrugged. “I paint every now and then. It loosens me up. I’m not very good though.”
She snorted. “Yes, you are. All of this is . . . Tell me about them.” She gestured to the photo of the family.
“A few years ago TIME magazine did a story on fracking in the Appalachians. The woman’s husband was killed in an accident on the job, leaving her with five kids and no income. These are the two youngest.” He scratched his bearded chin. “They could barely keep the lights on, but she offered me tea and a homemade biscuit. The kids played marbles with me.”
Painful things made beautiful.
She made a slow turn, taking in the array of photos. People, landscapes, old buildings, street scenes. “Are they all from TIME, or . . . ?”
“No, that one’s National Geographic. That’s Travel + Leisure . . .” He started to point to another photo but let his arm fall. “It’s just a random assortment. They asked me to bring some to leave on display this summer while I’m mentoring.”
“I didn’t realize you were so . . . Are you famous?”
He laughed.
“I’m serious. Are you some famous photographer I should know about?”
“What difference does it make? I’m just a guy who takes pictures and gets paid for them. At least that’s the goal.”
“These are more than just ‘pictures’ though. They’re incredible. Why are you wasting time at this little art retreat when you could be out winning a Pulitzer or something?”
“Now you’re just embarrassing me.” He stepped back from the wall. “I don’t know. You’ve seen how well I fit in.” He cut his eyes to her and she smiled, then remembered she was supposed to be mad at him. “For some reason, they keep asking me to come back and I keep saying yes. I guess one day maybe I won’t, but it works for now. And Halcyon isn’t just some ‘little art retreat.’ It’s a big deal to a lot of people in the art world.”
He turned toward a door at the back of the room and pulled his boots off. “None of this matters though. What I really wanted you to see is in here. Take your shoes off, if you don’t mind. I like to keep it clean.” She dropped her sandals next to his boots, then followed him as he opened the door and turned on the light. A counter along one wall held bins, trays, and bottles. A thin metal wire dotted with clips was strung across one wall.
“A darkroom? How come no one told me about this?”
“It’s my job to let the photographers know about it.”
She stared at him.
“Well, I’m telling you now. And you haven’t needed a darkroom until now.”
He reached in front of her and flipped another switch on the wall. The main lights went out while another one clicked on, coating the room in a soft red glow. “Let’s see what you got today.”
She passed his camera to him. “I haven’t developed film in a while.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it.” His voice was low, as if excess noise would damage the film as much as light.
He pulled the film out of the camera and loaded it into the spiral developing reel.
“The reel goes into the processing tank here.” He picked up a bottle of developer and poured the liquid into a clear beaker, along with water from a bucket on the counter. “It has to be the right temperature or it’ll ruin the film. Hand me that thermometer, will you?” She gave it to him and he slid it into the beaker. “Perfect. Now, I want you to pour the developer into the tank and we’ll start the timer.”
The red light offered enough light to see shapes and forms, but not enough to see small details. When she had trouble finding the hole at the top of the tank to pour the developer, he reached over and moved her hands to the right place. “There. Pour it in, then hit the timer.”
They inverted the tank to make sure the developer coated all the film inside, then repeated it twice more, waiting a minute or so between movements.
“Next is stop bath, fixer, and holding bath, in that order.” He held a pair of tongs out to her. “Use these, never your fingers, although I’m sure you remember that. And don’t forget to rinse them off before you move them to another solution.” He turned the sink faucet on, and she rinsed the ends of the tongs before moving the photo paper to the next tray.
The manual process was fickle and each movement, no matter how insignificant it seemed, could have a huge effect on the outcome of the photos. She hardly knew this man—wasn’t even sure if she liked him very much—but in the soft light of the darkroom, he was kind, helpful. A surprisingly gentle teacher.
As they waited for the final wash, he hopped up onto the edge of the metal counter behind her. “I owe you an apology.”
“Oh?” She leaned against the table and faced him. “What for?”
He glanced down at his bare feet and leaned forward onto his hands. “Calling you an amateur. Saying you weren’t taking the right shots. It was too much.”
Part of her wanted to make a joke out of it, to brush it off as nothing and move on to something easier, but instead she nodded. “It was hard to hear. You made me mad.”
“I know and I’m sorry.” He gave a small half grin. “People don’t always like me very much. I’m sure you can see why.”
She shrugged. “You won’t win any etiquette contests, I’ll give you that. But I get it. And your push helped me, I think.”
“Then I’m glad I could help.”
She smiled. “Don’t take all the credit. Yes, I wanted to prove you wrong—and maybe prove myself wrong too. Prove that I really am supposed to be here. But I also just needed to find my footing. Something about The Bottoms—the ugliness, the desolation—it worked for me.”
“Like I said, you didn’t need to look far to find your creative eye. I knew it was in there. It just gets buried by life if you let it.”
She sighed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Okay, here’s something you don’t know.” He sat up straighter and ran a hand through his hair, leaving bits sticking up in tufts. “I almost gave up photography five years ago.”
Jenna raised her eyebrows. “Why?”
“Why else do men make bad decisions? For a woman.”
“Ah. We do tend to mess things up.”
“Granted, she wasn’t trying to mess anything up—she just wanted me to stay.”
“And you wanted to go.”
He nodded. “I’ve been a photographer since my early twenties. I don’t put down roots. I never stay long in one place. I have an apartment in Atlanta, but I’m usually only there to catch up on sleep and pack for my next gig. I love to travel, so the life fits me well. But it’s hard on relationships, family and otherwise. Callie wanted me to stop traveling, to stay in Charleston with her.” He rubbed his forehead. “She actually wanted me to work for her dad at his investment firm.”
Jenna wrinkled her nose. “You don’t seem like the investment firm type.”
“Exactly. But I considered it. I figured Charleston had enough opportunities for photography and maybe I could travel some on the weekends.”
“So what happened?” She turned to the tray behind her to check the progress of the photos.
“Be patient.”
She faced him again.
“I was asked to mentor here for the summer. Then I was offered a freelance spot with National Geographic Traveler. I realized what I had going with work was too good to give up to sit in an office all day wearing a suit and drinking scotch with old men.”
“But you had to give her up too.”
He gave a slow nod, his gaze unfocused. “Haven’t talked to her since the day I told her I was leavi
ng. I tried to call her a few times after I left, but she never picked up.” After a moment, he blinked and focused on Jenna. “All this to say I understand the pull photography has. Any art, really. Anything that lets you capture the world as you see it and say things you can’t say with words. Sometimes it’s more important than anything else.”
He hopped off the counter and peered into the trays where the photos floated in solution. The images were suspended somewhere between undefined blobs and what she hoped would turn out to be not terrible.
“Tell me something about you.” He set the dripping tongs back onto the towel.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything. I just bared my soul.”
“I don’t like talking about myself. I’m better if you ask questions.” She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms.
“Okay. You’re not married.”
“That’s not a question.”
He smiled. “Okay. You’re young, you’re talented, you seem like a nice girl—why are you not married?”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I just told you. I’m elusive. Hard to pin down. But this isn’t about me anymore. And you told me to ask questions.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s kind of a long story.”
He gestured to the trays behind her. “We have nothing but time.”
She tilted her head side to side, stretching her tight neck muscles as if preparing for battle. “I’ll give you the abbreviated version. I moved to Wyoming with some friends after my freshman year of college. Worked, played, took pictures. Fell in love.”
Gregory shrugged. “It happens.”
She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “Jeremy was a photographer too, and a musician. Probably a better photographer, but he decided to make music his thing.”
When he packed up to join his band back home in Asheville, North Carolina, he’d asked Jenna to come too, and with nothing tying her to Wyoming, she went with him. Her camera continued to be good to her in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She sold her prints in galleries up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway and had a robust Etsy business, shipping her prints across the country, even some internationally.
“Etsy?” Gregory asked. “What’s that?”
“Are you serious?” She peered at him through the dim light. “It’s a website where people sell things.”
“Like Amazon?”
“No, not like Amazon. Just . . . look it up.”
“Okay. So you were in Asheville with your boyfriend and your thriving photography business. What happened?”
She held up her hands, then let them drop. “I got pregnant.”
She discovered she was pregnant on a Tuesday morning via a Clearblue Easy in the restroom of the Asheville Folk Gallery where she worked. Jeremy’s band had hired a publicist after a run of good shows, and the publicist had lined up a long string of gigs in the Northeast. Jenna waited until he returned from the tour before telling him. She was already three months pregnant by then, although still another month or so away from showing. He was a little excited but more hesitant. She saw it in his eyes right away: a baby didn’t have quite as much pull as the road did.
After that, his band went on longer and more frequent tours—up the East Coast, as far west as Texas, and even up to Boston. She moved out of his apartment and into a house with some friends so she wouldn’t be alone. Her roommates told her she was crazy for hanging on, but she thought being a few months away from holding an infant in her arms was a pretty good reason to hang on. Her only other choice was to do it alone, which was what ended up happening when Jeremy moved with the band to New York City.
“Did you ask him to stay?”
“I didn’t want to have to ask. So no. He left and I watched him go.” She hadn’t meant to tell him the whole story, but once she started talking, the story flowed.
“What’d you do?”
“I called my sister in the middle of the night. I hadn’t told her I was pregnant, so it was a bit of a shock. But Betsy just . . .” Jenna paused, remembering the silence on the phone when she blurted out the news to Betsy with no warning. “I know she wanted to say a lot, but she didn’t. She just showed up at my door the next night with a car full of diapers and baby gear and stayed until a couple weeks after Addie was born.”
“You have two kids though, right?”
She ran her hands across the smooth counter surface and nodded.
As luck would have it, she ran into Jeremy again soon after moving to Nashville. She hadn’t talked to him in over a year so she didn’t know he’d moved there to work with a new studio. He was happy to see her—and Addie—and Jenna desperately wanted her child to know her father.
“Deep down I knew he couldn’t have changed much, but I ignored that instinct and we gave it a shot anyway. It was good at first—the three of us together. But then I let my guard down. In every way.” She peered at Gregory to see if he understood. “Who would have thought I’d get pregnant a second time?”
She rubbed her eyes. “That pretty much ended things. He made himself scarce, and I just let him slide out of the picture again. It was easier that way. Well, it wasn’t easy, but at least I wasn’t trying to force something that obviously wasn’t supposed to work.”
It was quiet in the room. Too quiet. She wanted him to say something, but he was silent.
She laughed to cut the tension. “Clearly I have terrible taste in men and have no business trying to date anyone.”
Gregory shook his head and rubbed his cheek. “Geez, kid. You’re breaking my heart here.”
She stood up straighter and brushed her hair back from her face. “That was a very long answer to your question, but that’s why I’m not married. I might have said yes if he’d asked, but it’s probably better for all of us that he didn’t.”
He nodded. “If he had, you might not be here.”
“True,” she said, then pushed off the counter and turned to the trays, cutting off more questions and any possible sympathy she didn’t deserve. “Are they ready yet?”
It was a moment before he spoke. Finally, he stood next to her. “Pull them out and let’s see what we have.”
She gripped the edge of the first photo, holding it a moment to let the last of the water drip off, then clipped it to the wire. One by one, she lifted the photos and hung them up to dry. When she’d clipped all twelve photos, she stood back and studied them.
Not terrible, just like she’d hoped. New, vibrant life pushing against the barren and wasted. Promise seeping into the dark places. Not terrible at all.
“See what you did? You were patient. Rather than shooting the first scene you came to, you waited until you saw something of worth. And because of that, I see it too.” He moved down the line. “Without color as a distraction, the contrast between light and dark is the focus. Look at the pattern here on the leaves.” He pointed to the repeating stripes on a palm branch. “You angled the shot just right to draw our eye here. And this one—this one is different.”
He paused in front of a shot Jenna took of one of the other artists, Terry, standing under a towering oak, his face tipped up and just catching the light. “Adding the human element here increases the emotional impact of the scene. It also gives us some perspective as to just how massive the tree is.” He turned to her in the dim light. “How do you feel about these?”
She heard the smile in his voice, and she smiled too. “Good. I feel good.”
“I think you’ve found your place, kid. You did all this. Own it. Enjoy it.”
eighteen
Ty
Between an important South Alabama Dairy Farmers’ Association meeting, working with Carlos to keep the pump from giving out again, and a weekend lightning storm that temporarily took out power to the milking barn, it was early the next week before Ty could take a breather.
Roger Daily had his grandchildren for a few days, and not knowing what to do with three kids underfoot, he brought them to Ty’s place to
play with Addie and Walsh. His wife, Linda, came too, the five of them piling out of Roger’s ancient blue-and-white truck like clowns at a circus. Addie and Walsh were playing on the big swing when the Dailys arrived, and the grandkids ran straight for them.
Roger trudged over to where Ty stood next to the fence of the holding pen. He took off his cap and brushed his hands through his stiff white hair. “I can take ’em for a few hours, but all weekend?” He laughed a little. “Little ones just wear me out.”
“I know what you mean,” Ty said with a smile, although he didn’t really know. Being so busy in the barn, the burden of keeping up with the girls had fallen mostly on Betsy’s shoulders. Not that they were much of a burden. He’d liked having them around this week—their laughter, their excited faces peeking around the barn door, their loose and limber joy.
He was starting to think he’d miss them a little when they were gone.
“I know you heard the reports from the weather center.” Roger slapped his cap back on his head and squinted into the sun. “There’s already one storm out there. Only June and they’re lining up like dominoes.”
Ty laughed. “You always so gloom and doom, Roger? You and I both know those things come and go as they please. Active season doesn’t always mean it’ll be active around here.”
“That’s true. But we’re nothing if not prepared, right?”
“You’re right about that. I already got your plywood on my upper windows.”
“Farmers help each other out. Your grandfather would have been the first to say that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I think I’ll go check out the placement of those boards, if you don’t mind. I’d hate for water to seep in somewhere, ruin your hard work.”
“I don’t think I missed any holes, but you’re welcome to check for me.”
“I do it for your grandfather. He’d want me to keep an eye out for you.”
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