I’m a wreck.
I gather my things: my mom’s present (which required no effort on my part since for every birthday, half birthday, and Christmas she sends me a direct link to exactly what she wants, and then does an elaborately surprised face when she opens it), my purse, and my camera. Whatever else tonight brings, it’ll give me an opportunity for a crowd shot, and while it won’t necessarily be on theme, I’ll still have my assignment ready for next week’s class. My family will make good subjects too. If nothing else, the Hawthornes—except for me, I guess—are animated, alive in themselves in a way that’s transfixing to watch.
Alex had offered to meet me there, to save me the back-and-forth of going in and out of the city, but that seemed risky, Alex getting there before me. Anyways, the drive all the way back to Kit’s gives me time to comfort myself about how this will go. The big personalities of my mom and my siblings, the way my dad takes his straight-man suburban normalcy seriously enough that he’s as much a part of the performance as they are—maybe it’ll be enough for Alex to take in that he won’t notice the dynamic I’m most worried about, the one that shows how they all still treat me with kid gloves.
But already the person I was in that conference room today feels like someone else entirely, and I hate, hate,hatethat I asked him to come.
He’s outside when I pull up, not in one of Kit’s cherished white wood rockers, but standing on the top step, leaning against one of the big beams that holds up the front porch where I’ve sat dozens of times, talking and laughing with my best friends. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a shudder of discomfort go up my spine, seeing him there, his head tipped down to his phone, his black hair falling across his furrowed brow as he flicks his thumb upward on the screen—forearm, obviously, doing some of its best subtle work. Now I’ll probably always associate this porch with him, a probably that turns into a definitely when he looks up, a crooked smile evening out the lines of his brow when he sees me.
“I like those shorts,” he says when he gets in the car, his eyes tracing over my bare legs. He looks up at my face, smiles that crooked smile again, and leans over my parking brake to press a firm kiss against my lips. When he pulls back, he sets one big, warm palm against my thigh, and it takes me a few seconds to remember how to operate a motor vehicle. “How was work today?” he asks, casual as you please, as though this is something we always do, provide small accountings of our days. I pull away from the curb and have to remind myself of what the next turn is. I’m navigating these familiar streets likea first timer.
“It was—okay?” No. I’m not going to let my nerves spoil the day I had. “It was actually really good.” I tell him about the meeting, about Dennise letting me take the lead, and while he listens he strokes his thumb idly on my thigh, asking me questions about Dennise, about what will happen next for the family. He tells me I must be reallygood at my job.
When I ask him about his own day, he laughs and says he went to see Bart after his session with Patricia, and he was there for three hours, getting the old FG cleaned but also looking at every used camera Bart has in the shop. “He and Henry have to meet,” he says. “I think they’d produce some kind of singularity.”
It all goes a long way toward easing my nerves, but once we’re on the highway heading west, Friday evening traffic out to the Cherry Hill suburbs heavy with SUVs and minivans, I decide to givehim a warning.
“My family. They can be—intense.”
“Yeah?”
I look over at him briefly, see if he’s got any traces of impending panic. Maybe he was only being polite, saying yes to this. Maybe this—a family party with a woman who’s only temporary, no matter how much she’s tied up with his sister—is the exact kind of obligation that’ll send him out into the night, heart thudding and stomach roiling, feeling trapped and desperate. But his face looks placid, that shovel-sharp line of his jaw not tight with tension as he looks calmly out the window at the slowly passing scenery. I wonder if this is how it is with me and him, if there’s some strange seesaw effect between us. He gets panicked; I get calm. I get nervous; he gets restful.
“Like not about who your dentist is or what your credit score is,” I add. “But probably not all that different either.”
The hand he’s kept on my thigh moves, a brief caress up and down that lets me feel the callouses at the top of his palm, that has me shifting my butt in the seat just to get some relief from the pulse between my legs.
“I’ll handle them.” His voice has notched down an octave, as if that small caress has affected him just as much as it has me. “I’m used to all kinds of people.”
And of course that must be true. Of course Alex has been all over the world, photographing families from all different cultures in all different kinds of situations. Of course he knows how to set everyone at ease, to make it so they don’t notice when he lifts a camera to his eye and captures thetruth of them.
The problem is, that’s exactly what I’m sonervous about.
* * * *
“He seems nice, Greens,” says Humphrey, setting his plate down beside me before pulling out one of the cheap plastic chairs set out around one of the old, fold-up tables dotting the backyard. Eight in all, each topped with a faded, red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, small metal pails filled with bright yellow daisies in the center, my mom’s favorite. It always looks like this for my mom’s half birthday, at least as long as I can remember, and back when I lived here it’d been my job to do the flowers, the heavy lifting of the tables and chairs going to my brothers and Ava. When Humphrey sits, the back two legs of his chair sink slightly into my dad’s manicured lawn, which he’ll probably spend all day tomorrow complaining about to my mother, though he’ll be secretly pleased that there were over fifty people here admiring his grilling skills even as they trampled his grass.
“Your standard fare,” I say, nodding to his plate, where he’s got a bun with no burger—just cheese, lettuce, tomato, and an absurd amount of mustard—and a stack of watermelon that’ll probably give him stomach cramps later. Classic Humph. He hasn’t eaten meat since he was twelve. My dad tookit pretty hard.
“He’s handsome too. GQ handsome. Felipe asked him if he uses growth cream onhis eyebrows.”
“Ohjeez,” I say, raising a hand to my forehead and looking over toward the deck, where Alex leans casually on a railing talking to Humphrey’s husband, seemingly unconcerned about his eyebrows, which are in fact magnificent but I don’t think cream assisted. “Everyone’s treating him like a celebrity.”
Humph shrugs, taking a bite of his meatless sandwich. “He is, kind of. The photographs, sure, but that face, God. Mom asked him if he’d run lines forCat on a Hot Tin Roofwith her theater group while he’s here.”
The theater group in question, actually, is two tables away, and when I look over half of them are looking at Alex like he’s a piece of birthday cake they’re waiting for and the other half—including Ava, who’s already pinched me and told me I have alotof explaining to do—are looking at me like I have already eaten that entire birthday cake. I feel the strangest, most unfamiliar impulse: to smile back at them like I have.
That smugness only lasts for a minute.
“Your boyfriend told Dad that there’s a whole day dedicated to grilling in South Africa,” Cary says, taking a seat in that loose-limbed, master-of-the-universe way he has, the most like his movie-star namesake than any of us. He’s gray at the temples, more wrinkled now around his mouth and eyes, especially now that he and my sister-in-law have two preteens. But still it’s usually Cary that the theater group gawks at during these events. “He told him most of them use a Weber but pronounce it ‘Veeber.’ So now Dad wants to go to South Africa and he wants to give Alex Grandma’s engagement ring to propose to you.”
Humph laughs, and I put my face in my hands. Cary’s probably joking, at least about the ring, but Alex has made quite an impression over the course of the evening. If there’s any latent panic, he’s doing a bang-up job of hiding it, because all night he’s been the picture of casual, friendly interest—the perfect party guest, shaking hands and demurring humbly about his work, shifting the focus of conversations back to whomever he’s speaking to. He even talked to Doug about Mass Effect, in spite of the fact that I don’t think he knows what a gaming console is.
I’m embarrassed by my brothers’ gentle teasing, but if there’s one benefit to Alex being such a star, it’s that it’s been no problem at all for things to turn out exactly as I’d hoped. In the hustle and bustle of the party, in the gathered guests’ and my family’s curiosity about Alex, it’s been easy for me to stay where I’m most comfortable—in the background. I’ve already taken a few pictures, one when my mother was welcoming some of her guests from the Barden Orchestra with a jazzy rendition of “It’s My Party,” and another when most of the guests were eating. For the second one, Alex had stood close behind me like he had that day in the park, making himself see what I’d seen. He’d murmured a question about how I’d handle the string of white lights hanging over the deck, and the sound of his low voice had made me hunch my shoulders so no one could see my nipples bead under my shirt. Afterward, I’d given him a scolding look that had made him quirk his mouth in amusement. But in his eyes I’d seen the heat of awareness, of desire.
Since then, we’d both kept a bit of distance.
“So he is your boyfriend, then?” says Cary, andI lift my head.
