The Art of the Kiss Page 11

  Charles had already vowed that he was going to have a big business of his own right there near the square of Fairyland. He would never go on long work trips and be away more than he was home. He was going to have a wife and three kids and a Golden Retriever, and every night, his whole family would be all around him, like the plastic balls in those bins he and his friends liked to jump into at their favorite pizzeria. The one with the video games and the superfast go-kart track.

  But in the meantime, he was going to spend Saturday with his dad, even if that meant he was going to get stuck at some crummy old camera shop.

  Inside, Minyard’s was packed. Which seemed a little weird, since it was more than seven whole months until Christmas. In December, his mother made it a point to take Charles and his sisters to the mall, give them money to buy presents for each other. The toy stores would be crazy, swarming with people who sometimes fought over Transformers and talking Cabbage Patch dolls. Charles would grab the presents for his sisters and race toward the front counter while leaning forward with one arm draped protectively over his head, attempting to make sure he didn’t get whacked with anybody’s angry purse.

  Minyard’s kind of reminded Charles of that, as he inched his way around people much taller than him.

  He stuck close to his dad, a little afraid that they might get separated.

  At the edge of the crowd, his dad tried to steer Charles toward a “Kids’ Cameras” display.

  Only, the aisle was jammed. And no one had any interest in moving. They were staring up, like they were in some kind of hypnotic trance.

  Charles quickly realized it wasn’t a trance at all—they were simply staring at a picture that hung up high, near the ceiling.

  A kissing picture. Charles shuddered. The fire in his cheeks grew hotter when his own dad stopped to look at it…and even worse, when he tilted his head a bit and his eyes took on a twinkle.

  One of the onlookers—a man about Charles’s dad’s age—called out to a woman behind the counter. He called her Sharon. Told her how much he liked her picture.

  Everyone nodded, adding their own compliment—yes, it was so touching, beautiful…

  Charles began to let go of his embarrassment. It drifted off, like a helium balloon out of his hand. It would be so nice to get that kind of attention, Charles thought, his eyes roving back up toward his father again. How wonderful it would be to make people smile.

  ~Sharon~

  We heard the downstairs buzzer first thing on Sunday morning—the morning after I’d given away our camera. Somebody out on the sidewalk below, telling us they were at our door. We never got buzzed. Not anymore.

  “Minyard Photography?” a female voice asked.

  Michael approached the intercom, pressed the button to speak, and offered, “This is Michael.”

  “Michael—Minyard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Minyard Photography?”

  “This is Michael.”

  “Michael—Minyard!”

  “Yes.”

  Michael and I exchanged confused glances. I stuck my head in our apartment window and glanced down at the sidewalk below, where I found the girl from the day before doing some sort of celebratory dance. Specifically, she banged her knees together three times and pumped her fist before jutting her neck forward in a chicken-style pecking motion.

  “Michael Minyard!” she repeated joyfully.

  “Yes. May I ask who this is?”

  She must have worried she was losing him, because her words were coming faster—almost like she was chasing him with sentences. “Iknowyour signsaysclosed. ButIboughtacamerahere. Fromawoman. YesterdaywhenIwashere. Shetoldme—”

  “I think you’re looking for Sharon,” Michael said.

  “Yes! Sharon. That’s her name. Sorry. I should have said that first. See, she hooked me up with this film camera…”

  But I was already thundering down the steps.

  This was going to be great. Because at that moment, I believed that this Heather person had returned because something had gone wrong. She was infuriated. She’d caught us at home, and now, she was going to complain (it was the one thing people were good at anymore), wailing that she couldn’t make the ancient camera work, that it was a hunk of junk. That’s why she was celebrating. She had me cornered. She was going to demand—I didn’t know. Some sort of retribution. And while she was at it, throw the useless camera back in my face.

  Not that I was glad some horror had befallen the girl at her shoot. But she was young, and everything’s fixable when you’re young. One messed-up shoot couldn’t possibly derail her. I’d make everything okay. Offer to get in touch with her client to help smooth things over. Break out my own (albeit, out-of-date) list of contacts. Maybe someone needed a senior picture. Grandbaby’s first photo shoot. Something. This first client of hers could prove to be nothing but a blip, a bump. People weren’t necessarily forgiving, but they had short memories.

  Yeah, that’s what I was thinking then. And listen, it was all a bunch of balderdash, as my dad would have put it. I could rationalize it all I wanted (and look, I really did think my old Nikon still had some life left in it), but the truth was, the day before, with Heather’s broken camera in front of me and Michael on the stairs, I’d been doing something for myself. Not Heather.

  I guess that’s the way we wind up hurting others, isn’t it? We fall victim to moments of extreme tunnel vision. We don’t realize, in the exact moment that we take action, how we could potentially do damage to someone else in the process.

  Anyway, on that Sunday, when Heather returned, I was doing it again: thinking of myself. I was so happy. I could stop trying to come up with a way to address what had happened the day before. The camera. The radio. I’d never have to bring it up in some awful, thorny confrontation. I was convinced Michael would hear the girl’s anger and he would have to come to grips with the fact that there was absolutely nothing magical about that camera at all.

  Nothing.

  Magic. Please.

  It was me. Don’t you see that? I didn’t need some dumb magic, Michael. I didn’t.

  I threw open the shop door.

  “Sharon!” Heather cried, out of breath.

  I ushered her inside, where her angry words would have a better chance of carrying all the way upstairs.

  Heather said, “I had no idea where to get film developed anymore. I started with this place, since you were the one who gave it to me, and I noticed when I got here, you have developing listed on your window...”

  She gestured toward the plate glass, which we’d last had fully painted in the mid-’90s. Since then, I’d been touching up the sign myself, but never did it occur to me to remove the service completely.

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “You need something developed? You mean you actually used the camera?”

  “Uh, yes?” She shot me an expression that seemed to ask, Isn’t that why you gave me the camera in the first place? To take pictures?

  “You didn’t have to delay your shoot? You didn’t, say, have to make your client wait while you found a big box store where you could pick up a digital camera?”

  “I—no. I didn’t have any money. No.”

  “Your—boyfriend? The one you mentioned?”

  “No. I’d already put him out asking for a ride. No, I couldn’t do that. I guess I could have tried my friend. Her son was the one who broke the camera in the first place—but that really wouldn’t have been right, either. They already felt bad enough. Poor little Aiden.” She shook her head.

  Poor Aiden? Who was this girl? Some syrupy sweet Pollyanna?

  “I know it’s asking a lot, probably,” Heather said. “Being Sunday and all. And I know you’re closed, but would you mind? Developing? I think,” she added, reaching into her purse, “I think I have enough to pay you. I went through my coat pockets last night…”

  Good grief. Was she serious?

  “Look, getting to see what you took is payment enough,” I assured her. As pr
oof, I immediately headed toward the darkroom in the studio’s basement.

  Heather followed without hesitation.

  I couldn’t decide if that made her a trusting soul or a fool. Our basement was one of those unfinished spaces with not a single back door or ground-level window to offer a method of escape. A concrete floor that’d be easy to hose down after a homicide or two. One way down, one way out.

  My flip-flops echoed with each step as I made a beeline for the metal sink along the far wall, positioned beneath a rope clothesline that stretched across the length of our basement. Heather started gnawing on her bottom lip. I don’t know, maybe jugs of developing chemicals had awakened the girl’s fears. All the better to melt your skin off, my pretty.

  I reached into the back pocket of my jeans to retrieve a pair of reading glasses. Nobody’s afraid of old people with reading glasses, and the back pockets of my jeans had been embroidered with faded purple peace signs. (Fashion that had never died, not completely, that I had stumbled upon while shopping and bought in a moment of reminiscence.) Come on, though—how many sociopaths were old ladies in faded blue jeans covered in peace signs?

  “Hand me that jug over there, will you?” I asked.

  But Heather was hesitating. If I were her, I’d probably have started thinking this was how good girls met bad ends. Because, like her, they were broke and had no other options. That was how nice little would-be princesses wound up in the woods eating poison apples. Didn’t Snow White actually have massive student loans and debt collectors coming after her? Hadn’t her horse been repossessed, and wasn’t that why she was hiding out in the woods with seven strangers in the first place?

  I was sure I’d heard that somewhere.

  Ah, but then, Michael probably would have corrected me, wouldn’t he? Like he had that first day in Bleeker’s? Shown me there was no place for modern cynicism in fairy tales.

  I’d disagree, of course.

  But Michael wasn’t around. It was just the two of us girls. I offered her an it’s honestly okay smile.

  She smiled back. And slid the jug from the shelf.

  I flicked on those creepy red darkroom lights—the kind that show up in old movies. I grabbed a pair of tongs and began to pour the developer into a small basin, humming softly.

  “This room doesn’t get a lot of use anymore,” I admitted. “But I never quit making sure we’d have the right supplies. You never know who’s going to walk through the door, and I couldn’t exactly turn a potential customer away because my chemicals had expired, right?”

  Heather placed the camera case on the ground, flicking the clasps open.

  “So what’d you think of it?”

  “I didn’t—it wouldn’t…” Heather shrugged pitifully. “The camera was tricky.”

  I bet it was. I did my best to hide the new smile trying to break through. “Trouble, eh?”

  Heather let out a sigh of pure, unadulterated humiliation. “One. I only managed to take one picture.”

  And then she began to tell me her story.

  ~Heather~

  I got there forty minutes late. With my ex-boyfriend. And your old film camera, which I really didn’t know how to work.

  The Liu reunion was easy to spot. They had on coordinated khaki skirts or shorts with navy blue tops. The littlest ones were squealing and chasing each other, getting all wrinkled and muddy. One little boy was even burying another boy in the sand near the tire swings.

  Apparently, kid time worked like dog years, and forty minutes was the same as seventeen billion hours.

  Charles spotted me fighting all my camera gear. I know, I know. It wasn’t like I really needed it anymore. So much of it was for my old camera. But I was so nervous, I didn’t really know what I was doing.

  He hurried my way, frowning beneath a sadly windblown mop of black hair. I was sure it wasn’t the professional picture he usually presented as owner and Chief Executive of Everything at Liu Marketing Strategies, Inc.

  He started talking (ahem, scolding me), even while he was still walking my way. His voice was a cocktail of one part annoyed boss mixed with two parts infuriated-but-trying-to-dial-it-back-because-we’re-stuck-together-for-the-semester teacher, topped with a garnish of perturbed father. Every single syllable was making me curl up and shrink, like a piece of pink meat in a hot skillet.

  I was frying. And all I could do was stand there and take it.

  “…hoped you’d have been here to document some earlier moments…” he was snapping. “My father is here…Only have cell phone photos…”

  In the background, high-pitched shouts of kids playing rang as taunts. The same nanny nanny boo boo tease that Darth Billy loved to lob at me.

  Was Liu firing me?

  No, he was pointing. “…at least you can take the family photo…”

  I scrambled to unearth the Nikon. It was so foreign to me, it might as well have been one of those giant cameras that showed up in Civil War dramas—one of those contraptions with the black cloth hanging off the back that photographers stuck their heads into.

  Ryan had crossed to the other side of the park. He’d perched himself on top of a picnic table and wormed his earbuds into his ears. Had he heard my tongue-lashing?

  My face flamed at the mere possibility.

  The Lius gathered near a pavilion. Most of them gathered, anyway. The younger members didn’t want to come. A few teenagers were sent out to wrangle them up. But the little ones were dragging their feet, and it seemed like the wrangling was gearing up to take a while, which was okay. I really needed the extra few moments to remember the instructions you’d given me at the shop, Sharon—how to focus, how to wind the film.

  I realized I should have asked you how to tell grumpy people to pose. After another ten minutes (or six and a half weeks—who could tell at that point?), I took a deep breath and tried to make a motion for the Lius to squeeze together. How many generations had Charles told me were there? Four? Five?

  A little kid screech hit the air as someone on the front row tried to separate a girl from a boy standing next to her. He was the only person not dressed in the same khaki and blue colors. Instead, he was wearing a pair of worn-out black cotton shorts and a faded Nike T-shirt. “He’s not family, sweetie,” the grown-ups tried to reason. “He can wait a minute, then you can play.”

  But the little girl screamed again and refused to pull her arms away from her friend’s neck.

  Her parents gave up quickly. Maybe they wouldn’t have if I’d gotten there sooner. Maybe they were already feeling pretty worse for wear themselves. But they agreed. Fine, they all sighed, your friend can stay. The two kids beamed these enormous victory smiles at me.

  The rest of the Lius followed, giving me their best, most practiced smiles.

  I flinched. Gulped.

  Game time.

  I squeezed the shutter button, but the camera refused to cooperate.

  I’m not kidding. It actually felt like the camera kicked my hands away.

  I frowned. And tried again.

  Nothing. No click. No groan. No snap. No hint of a sign that the camera even worked.

  My panic exploded. I felt like crying. Everything was slipping through my hands.

  I was ruining everything.

  “Uh—why don’t we try it over here?” I asked, pointing. My voice was soft and musical, covering the strangled feeling I was fighting. Sweat broke through my shirt, making dark splotches. I kicked off my flats—which were stupid to wear to the park, anyway. I tossed them with the rest of my gear, piled next to Ryan at the picnic table.

  I tried to act like that was so much better—like the shoes had really been holding me back.

  From the picnic table, Ryan kept his eyes on me, the nitwit conducting a calamity.

  I was so mortified. He was such a beautiful person, there to help me even after he’d decided he didn’t want me in his life anymore. All I was doing was digging myself deeper into my catastrophe. I was so lost. And your camera wasn’t worki
ng.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I hissed at the thing, too quietly for the Lius to hear.

  My eyes prickled with tears. I can’t blame the camera, I told myself. The real truth is I’m not good enough.

  My dream was crumbling. Even after you and Ryan had tried to rescue me. I’d never had the right to imagine a dream like that could be mine. I didn’t have what it took.

  I tried another shot, anyway. What else could I do? Still, your camera refused.

  Refused, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was pathetic. No good. A faker.

  But as I stood there silently scolding myself, I did realize how tightly—even angrily—I was holding the camera. Maybe I was being too rough. Maybe that was every bit as wrong as treating people harshly. Maybe, right then, in my sweaty desperation, as tears were forming and my ex was staring at me, grateful he’d broken things off, and a whole family was missing their opportunity to actually enjoy the perfect summer day together, I was treating the camera with cruelty.

  Isn’t that stupid? I was worried I was being mean to a camera.

  But see, I’d promised my mom…I know it sounds pretty flimsy, but I’d been told if you were good to the world, the world would be good to you. And when you think there are no options left, you wind up believing in senseless rabbit foot stuff.

  So I relaxed my grip on the camera in an apologetic way.

  But the torture didn’t end. Not yet. We kept dancing around the park, me and the Lius. One location after another, one attempt after another. Sun, shade, sun and shade, green backdrop, stone backdrop, sky backdrop. And every single time, the camera kicked against my fingers. Refusing my request.

  Antsy and hot and bored, the children fidgeted and scratched and whined. They tugged their shirts out as soon as their parents tucked them in. They mussed their hair as soon as it was slicked into place. They wailed and they complained and they swung their arms and made weird sputtering noises with their lips. They dug the toes of their polished shoes into the dirt.