The Art of the Kiss Page 5

  Forget ridiculous. It was more than goofy. Frankly, it was kind of twisted.

  Ryan and Heather pulled into a gas station parking lot.

  Amanda followed, steering quickly to the far side, behind a truck pulling a boat.

  Had they seen her? She wasn’t sure. They were talking and didn’t appear to notice her. Did she want them to see her? Why was she hiding?

  Finally, Ryan got out, reached for a nozzle at the nearest pump. Heather popped her own door to circle around to the trunk. She removed her camera and walked toward the nearby sidewalk.

  Why?

  Amanda stepped from her Escalade and freed Aiden from his car seat.

  Together, she and her son headed for Ryan’s car.

  What are you doing? Amanda asked herself.

  Ryan glanced over his shoulder and waved.

  Amanda clutched her stomach, feeling like she’d been punched. Less than a year ago, around the same time Heather had announced she’d wanted to introduce her new love to her best friend, they’d all gone out to dinner together. Amanda’d chosen the ritziest joint in town, worn her swankiest cocktail dress and her chandelier-iest earrings. She’d gotten tickled at how Ryan and Heather had looked like a couple of out-of-place kids from appetizer to dessert, neither one of them ever managing to get comfortable with the starched linen tablecloth and their dress-up clothes and the wine list. So tickled, in fact, that at one point, somewhere between the consommé and the poached salmon, she’d excused herself to the ladies’ room and had doubled over the sink in a round of belly laughter.

  When she’d finally returned, Tom was playing the Good Husband role, carrying on the conversation in her absence, asking Ryan what he did for a living. Amanda bit her lip, ready to have to stifle more laughter. It was going to be something absurd. Like he’d say he was an “entrepreneur,” which of course meant he had been unemployed since tossing his high school mortarboard hat into the air. Or he was going to be a big famous actor, right there in Fairyland! Something decidedly juvenile.

  But, no. Ryan was a musician, Heather had announced, smiling at him, her hand on his arm. A musician, recording engineer, and a guitar teacher over at Slade Music.

  “You’ll never believe this,” Heather told Amanda. “We saw him play. In high school! And we loved his band. But we went to different schools...”

  Amanda curled her fingers around her salad fork, every bit as tightly as her jeans had once circled her early-twenty-something thighs. She was the one who’d really loved music growing up. The one who’d been obsessed, the one with the towers of vinyl, the one who’d known the lyrics to every song on the radio, the one standing in mile-long lines (once in the rain and once in a blistering heat that had resulted in a second-degree sunburn) for concert tickets. It was her addiction—Amanda’s—and Heather had simply been dragged along for the ride. Shortly after Amanda’s “I do”s, she’d given up her albums to make space in the master bedroom for an armoire to hold her husband’s business shirts and a separate rack for her own heels.

  She listened to music on her phone now, mostly as she pounded the treadmill at the gym. She hated digital music. She still had her concert T-shirts, though. Tom had started to tease her a few years ago, asking, “When’re you going to toss those things?” Initially, she’d teased him back, saying things like, “I noticed a few grays on you the other day. You’d better be glad I’m not one to toss old stuff.” But she’d gotten a little worried about it, and just to be safe, she’d haphazardly stuffed them all in a black plastic bag in the attic. She’d figured the lawn-and-leaf bag (her husband’s own storage container of choice) filled with unfolded, wadded items would lead Tom to believe it was something he had himself put in storage, something he hadn’t been able to part with. The shirts would be safe.

  Amanda was thinking of the shirts as she approached Ryan, the musician who had come to Heather’s rescue.

  It made the hole inside her sting all over again. Come to think of it, she’d felt a strange burning sensation in her chest the night they’d all had dinner together. Had that been the start of the festering hole inside of her? Had it really opened up that long ago? Now, the wound was old enough to be infected and painful?

  But what had given her the wound in the first place? She still didn’t know for sure.

  “I got her message,” Amanda explained with a shrug. Her mouth shook a little beneath the weight of her smile. “I got to her place just as you were pulling out. I can drive her to her shoot. If you need to be somewhere else. Or if it’s awkward for you—since—you know—the breakup.”

  A nice save. But did she mean it? Why did she offer? To make up for the awful things she’d been thinking about Heather? To make up for the business cards stuffed in her glove compartment, her spur-of-the-moment sabotages?

  Surely that had to be it. Didn’t it? So why didn’t it feel right?

  “It’s kind of a long drive,” Ryan muttered, eyeing Aiden. “It’s okay. I’ve got it.”

  Before Amanda could figure out what to say next, Aiden spotted Heather, calling her name and racing toward her as fast as his toddler legs would carry him.

  “She seemed pretty nervous about the gig, so I suggested she warm up, take a few practice shots…” Ryan rambled in Amanda’s ear.

  Heather didn’t hear Aiden calling her name. She was too busy lining up a shot of an old store across the street. Whatever the business was, it was housed in one of Fairyland’s turn-of-the-century buildings, the two-story stone kind, with living quarters upstairs. A giant striped cloth awning rippled over the entrance in the June breeze. Amanda frowned. The awning was too big. It did nothing but conceal the name on the plate-glass window. Come to think of it, Heather’s camera strap was also doing plenty of swaying and fluttering. In her apparent rush to take Ryan up on his practice shots suggestion, she’d failed to drape that strap around the back of her neck.

  Intent on getting to one of his all-time favorite people, Aiden increased his speed, adding a few unsteady but ecstatic skips along the way.

  “Traffic—” Ryan warned, but Amanda knew that wouldn’t be a problem. Aiden would never run into the street. He’d never run farther than Heather. Sweet Heather, who listened to Aiden’s nonsensical stories and colored with him on Amanda’s living room floor and played cars, all while making jokes about how nice it was to get away from Darth Billy. She frequently told Aiden he would never grow up to be mean like that. No, Aiden would be a cool guy, a good guy. A smiling Aiden would lap up Heather’s compliments while Amanda gritted her teeth because it was getting to be lunchtime, and Aiden would need his peanut butter sandwich. There they’d be, Heather the Neat Visitor and Amanda the Peanut Butter Sandwich Getter.

  “Heper!” Aiden called.

  Heather turned, offering him one of her best hey, fella glad to see you smiles.

  He raised his hands into the air. “Heper!”

  Heather held her camera with one hand as she waved back, her strap moving hypnotically.

  She leaned forward, reaching for Aiden.

  Aiden reached back. And found something to grab onto—the camera strap.

  He tugged.

  The camera tipped, tumbled.

  And shattered.

  Heather let out a sharp, piercing yelp of pure anguish.

  Before she could stop herself, Amanda smiled.

  ~Michael~

  “No, no,” Heather pleaded. “Do something.” Who was she talking to? Certainly not Aiden, who had recoiled at her scream and headed back for the safety of his mother’s arms. And it certainly couldn’t be the asphalt at her feet. It wasn’t like asphalt had ever been known for its ability to rescue—well—anything. Asphalt wasn’t exactly great at rewinding time or unsmashing shards of glass and plastic.

  Pavement couldn’t cushion a fall, couldn’t soothe the bruises caused by a sudden unexpected catastrophe. And it couldn’t straighten its back, level out a steep hill, either. Which meant the busted parts of her camera didn’t stop rolling.
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br />   Poor, distraught, horrified Heather began chasing her fractured pieces into traffic, not caring about oncoming cars. In that moment, she’d turned into a reckless child chasing her runaway ball. As though gathering up the camera fragments would make some sort of difference. As though the Nikon DSLR could ever be made whole again.

  Somewhere behind her, Amanda’s voice warbled, “Heather! I’m so sorry!”

  Heather carried the shards to the opposite side of the street. She plopped onto a wooden bench under a store awning, sweating and panting and distraught.

  She tried to power on what little remained of the camera.

  It let out a pitiful squeaky noise like a bird with a broken wing. The lens was cracked. Buttons were missing from the crushed and dented back.

  It was over, over.

  “Kaput,” Heather moaned.

  She gasped, trying to catch her breath. Her mind swirled, her thoughts becoming a tornado. What emotion should she grab onto? What did she feel more than any other? Disappointment? Sadness? Frustration? Anger?

  Anger.

  Heather fumed.

  At least, she fumed for a slice of a second, until a wail hit the air. Across the street, Aiden sobbed in his mother’s arms. Amanda cooed and Ryan stroked his head, attempting to comfort him. He cried in his vocal little-kid way that had every bit as much to do with flat-out screaming as it did with real tears.

  Well, that did it. She couldn’t be mad. Not when Aiden was that upset. It wasn’t like toddlers went around plotting to ruin the world. They just didn’t know what they were doing.

  Regardless, Heather’s life was now a complete and total wreck, in as many shattered scraps as her camera. Her reputation had rolled down the street along with it. She would miss her photo shoot, and no one would ever trust her enough to hire her again.

  It would all come crashing down. She’d have to settle for a full-time job. The kind of mind-numbing soul-sucking permanent job that meant she’d done it, she’d caved, and Photo Phrenzy would never again be her business, only a hobby no one would ever take seriously.

  Oh, what a terrible word. Hobby.

  Heather would wonder, for the rest of her life, how close she’d been. Mere minutes away from finally getting her dud of a career off the ground, becoming a recognized, professional photographer?

  She’d blown it.

  Yes, she. Heather. It wasn’t all Aiden’s fault. In fact, very little of it was actually his fault. She should have taken a thousandth of a second to toss that strap behind her neck.

  As her mind reeled, a knock exploded behind her shoulder.

  Startled, Heather swiveled toward a plate-glass window.

  An older woman inside the shop was making some sort of strange hand-swirling motion at her.

  Did she not want Heather on her bench? Was she telling her to go away?

  No. That wasn’t a shoo motion she was making with her hands. It was going the opposite direction. Come in, come in, that’s what she was saying.

  Heather leaned back to get a look at the name painted on the glass.

  Minyard’s Photography.

  Sharon pressed her face closer to the window, having seen the entire disaster play out on the street. She motioned again, urging Heather to get off the bench and step inside the shop.

  ~June 11, 1969~

  When Missouri weather permitted, the square was Michael’s favorite place to have lunch. He enjoyed eating where he could see Fairyland’s comings and goings. People with their kids in strollers or dogs on leashes. Men in suits with an hour to grab a bite. Shoppers weighed down by bags nodding greetings at each other. Window washers waving their squeegees about. Even the occasional frustrated cop or two giving a few parking tickets. The harried expressions, the clock monitoring, the rush.

  Always, if he was patient about watching a person long enough, he’d see it: a look of total relief. It might be no longer than an exhale. But it was inevitable, there on the square during the lunch hour—the moment of a sigh. The lighting of a cigarette. The first bite into one of the tamales sold in a cart on the corner. Plopping down on one of the benches surrounding the square, soaking up a minute away from the office.

  Yes, Michael could count on it: the sweet look of a brief moment of peace.

  After a while, it was almost a guessing game. He’d focus on one face, one individual, and try to predict what would bring their little slice of comfort. How they’d find their breather, their break.

  He’d gotten quite good at it.

  This particular day, instead of relief—or even the promise of relief—he saw an unwavering look of intense concentration. It sharpened one woman’s face, refusing to lessen or let up. When a breeze caught her long black hair, she simply brushed the locks out of her eyes, her focus unbroken.

  A photographer. She had to be, with her unfolding of a tripod, her repeated checking of what had to be an exposure meter…

  This woman was working. In the midst of the square’s hustle and bustle. In what traditionally amounted to the pursuit of a little slice of noontime ease.

  Murio stepped from his namesake bar to prop a sign in his window advertising sandwich specials. Seeing the woman, Murio waved.

  She waved back.

  And still, no relief. Not pouring from her, anyway.

  Instead, she went right back to her setup next to the curb on the opposite side of the street from Murio’s.

  A car approached, honked at her once for having edged too far into his lane. The driver rolled his window down and shouted at her. Some kind of halfway-flirtatious hello.

  But the young woman—even from a distance, Michael could tell she was, in fact, quite lovely—didn’t move. Or flinch. Or hurry up. She took her photo. And then another.

  Only when she had finished did she take a step backward.

  A woman who stopped traffic. A woman who couldn’t be pushed aside.

  Michael grinned. He liked that.

  He wanted to talk to her, but also didn’t want to interrupt. He watched, waiting patiently for a pause. Some indication she might be open to a hello. But when she finished, she simply folded her tripod and took off before he had a chance.

  Michael promised himself that if he ever saw her face-to-face, he’d be sure to find out all about her.

  Excerpt from

  Wikipedia

  Sharon Grayson Minyard (born September 12, 1946) is an American photographer and businesswoman. Minyard was especially prolific from the 1970s-1990s, garnering several international awards. She is best known, however, for her strikingly realistic black and white photographs of midwestern small-town life and its people, most of which were taken in her lifelong home of Fairyland, Missouri. She has been heralded for the uncanny depth and respect present in her realistic portraiture. Her work has been showcased in photography exhibits nationwide. In her two most active decades, Minyard was frequently cited as one of the most influential photographers of her generation.

  ~Sharon~

  I wasn’t thinking about Michael anymore. I wasn’t thinking about his donation box or how he’d brought down the old Nikon. Not when I saw that poor girl out there on the bench. The one who’d just broken her own camera. I wasn’t thinking about my empty store or time gone by. I needed the girl to come inside, come closer. I swear, it was like looking at me.

  I felt it even before I knew for sure what was going on. Trust me—you do tend to get a twinge of nostalgia when, out of nowhere, you’re suddenly staring up again at the ghost of your younger self. That was why I knocked on the plate-glass window in the first place. I never did that. Any other time, I’d have assumed the girl on the bench was taking a breather and wouldn’t step through our door if I shouted anything less than, “Cash register’s open. Help yourself!”

  With each movement, the rattled young woman entering the store dropped another black plastic shard or screw. She began dropping words too. No, tossing them. Telling a strange, garbled story. Something about needing help. Fast. Which was also odd. Even in
its heyday, nobody had ever raced into Minyard’s on the verge of a meltdown.

  The lens tumbled onto the floor.

  We both squatted to pick it up.

  As our fingers tangled clumsily, I gave this stranger an up-close once-over. The new highlights. The well-put-together outfit that had also clearly seen the inside of a washing machine more than once or twice. The tag on the girl’s equipment bag—slung over one of her shoulders—that read, “Heather Scott.”

  “You looking for a replacement, Heather Scott?” I held up the busted lens.

  Heather hesitated. “I—I—”

  Together, we headed toward the front counter. Camera pieces thunked against the glass top.

  Heather sniffed. “I can’t believe…it happened so fast. I have a shoot—an honest, real, paid-in-advance job. My purse is in the car across the street. But I doubt I have enough. Can I charge a new camera on a couple of different credit cards? Is there anything left that I could trade in? Do you ever reuse parts? Are there even any functioning parts here? I mean, this can’t be fixed. Can it? Do you fix cameras like this? You don’t, do you?” The girl played a round of hopscotch as she jumped from one problem to another. But then again, I knew from experience panic usually made you do that.

  “You’re a professional photographer?” I asked.

  “Not really. Sort of. Almost. I’m trying.”

  I almost laughed out loud. Because I’d lived it. All of it. It engulfed me—that constant tired feeling, the long nights, the low-grade pulsing ache that stemmed from questions I could not turn off: Can I do this? Will it ever work? Will anyone ever believe I really am as good—no, better—than other photographers if I don’t have credentials? How do I get credentials if no one will hire me? How can I prove myself if no one gives me a shot?

  I knew what it was to look at a dream and see broken pieces. It all came back to me as Heather stared at the fragments of her camera there on my counter.