The mini donkey fell in behind me at the twenty-minute mark. I gave it a look. It concluded I had nothing useful to offer and kept following anyway.
I was going to have to add the mini donkey to the list.
I was swapping a memory card near the catering tent when a pink rhinestone cowboy boot appeared in my peripheral vision, followed rapidly by the rest of Caprice Hightower: Bobbie-Jean's twelve-year-old sister, in a high side ponytail with a bow the approximate size of a dinner plate, hot pink and bedazzled and completely committed, and a head-to-toe ensemble in coordinated pastels that appeared to be constructed entirely of rhinestones. The boots matched the bow. The bow matched the belt. The belt matched the purse, a small quilted pink thing with a rhinestone clasp, and the purse matched, somehow, the two dogs she had arranged under her arms: Chanel, a Pomeranian in a pink rhinestone harness, and Birkin, a Chihuahua in a matching lavender version, both of them regarding the situation with the glazed serenity of animals who had made their peace with it.
"Oh my God," Caprice said, making direct eye contact. "You're the pet photographer. I'm Caprice. I have forty-seventhousand followers." She did not say this like she was bragging. She said it like it was information I would need in order to make a sound decision. "Can we do a TikTok? I'm documenting the whole weekend for my series."
"I love that idea," I said, in the register that meant not today, not tomorrow, not in any future I could currently map. "Once I've got my establishing frames locked, I'll come find you."
Caprice considered this. Birkin shivered. Chanel assessed me with the flat professional gaze of a dog who had sat for more portrait sessions than most photographers I knew.
"Okay," Caprice said. "But I want at least three good angles." She walked away, rhinestones catching the afternoon light in every direction at once.
I had no intention of finding Caprice later.
DUTCH HAD CHANGED FORdinner.
My neck went warm before anything else had time to process the information. He was in dark-wash jeans and a crisp white button-down with the collar open, hair dry now, no hat, and I found my seat across the table and reminded myself I was here on a job.
The dinner wasn't what any version of Texas I'd been able to form opinions about had prepared me for. Smokestack Earl (a celebrity pitmaster, Bobbie-Jean had mentioned, flown in from Lockhart) had delivered a whole hog on a spit and three kinds of sausage and ribs you ate with your hands, all of it served by starched-white catering staff on Lenox china at a sixty-foot communal table, longneck Lone Stars sitting side by side with champagne flutes. The gap between those two objects was a complete composition.
Dutch asked about my work sometime after the first course. Real questions, the kind with actual space in them for an answer— what made pet photography different from portrait work generally, and nobody I'd worked with or been friends with or dated had ever thought to ask me that.
I told him about the Persian. The Tribeca loft. The Hermès carrier, formally declared sovereign territory and not to be surrendered on any terms I was authorized to offer. The forty-five minutes I'd spent on the floor narrating a story about a fictional mouse to an animal I was increasingly certain understood English and had simply reviewed my arguments and found them insufficient. The eventual, diplomatic emergence. The cat settling on my knee with the expression of a manager extending a probationary period rather than committing to a decision.
This story had received polite appreciation at four Manhattan dinner parties.
At a table in a Texas field with a celebrity pitmaster's ribs in front of me, it was apparently very funny.
I was laughing before I'd finished telling it.
Dutch laughed differently than he had at the fence post, quieter, like he'd been caught mid-thought.
My dimples don't happen on purpose. They've been there since birth and I've been aware of them since seventh grade, when Tyler Fitch announced their existence to thirty-two twelve-year-olds during a fire drill, and I spent two years after that developing what I consider adequate control. They show up only when a laugh catches me before I can manage it.
Dutch saw them.
His face did a small, involuntary thing. His eyes dropped, then came back. He didn't look somewhere else after that, and I gave my dinner plate my full professional attention.
Later, after Big Jim Hightower made a toast considerably more moving than I'd expected from a man in a bolo tie, Dutch told a story about a horse. Pancake — a retired draft horse he'dgotten as a half-broken three-year-old. Hadn't let a person touch him for the first full year Dutch had him.
"What changed it?" I asked.
"He figured out I wasn't going anywhere," Dutch said.
His face went quiet when he said it. Not staging it — just having it, quiet, nothing put on display. I pay attention to faces when they're not being watched. It's part of the job.
I didn't catch that the story might be about anything other than a horse.
Dutch leaned across to refill my wine. His fingers grazed mine on the stem of the glass, and the heat climbed before I could do a single thing about it — up my neck first, settling hard at my cheekbones, fair skin telling on me in real time. He wasn't looking away. He was watching it happen, steady and unhurried, and from the small shift in his expression I knew he'd read exactly what it meant.
My hand moved to the hollow at the base of my throat without my permission.
Stoney stood for the best-man rehearsal speech: short, a little devastating about Stoney's taste in horses, generous about his taste in women. The table laughed, the real kind. Dutch sat back down and held my gaze for two counts.
I'd been mid-sentence with Bobbie-Jean. I found the end of it eventually.
The catering crew started clearing. The family drifted toward the house. I excused myself and walked back across the property in the dark.
