“Do you want to come to our reception?”
Sylvie shook her head fast. “I’m not really a photographer.”
“No, as a guest. You don’t have to take pictures if you don’t want to.”
Sylvie fluttered her hands, scrambling for some excuse.
“His mom’s a chef,” the girl insisted, pointing to her new husband. “She did all the food. We have a bluegrass band coming. And there are cupcakes.”
The reception was in a barn even farther out in the country. Early-summer crickets were chirping, and there were a few goats and chickens wandering around. Most of the guests took off their shoes and walked around in the dirt. One old man didn’t leave the dance floor once. In the middle of a polka, he suddenly dropped to his knees, crawling around on the floor. Sylvie tensed, wondering if he’d had a stroke. Then the news rippled through the barn—Paul had lost his teeth again. Soon everyone was crawling on the dance floor, looking for Paul’s teeth. The polka kept playing. People laughed. No one seemed concerned about germs. Dangers like MRSA seemed very far away. A little girl found the dentures under a table, apparently kicked there by some overzealous dancer. She raised them above her head, running into the middle of the dance floor. The toothless man picked her up and spun her around. He wiped off the teeth and popped them back into his mouth. Sylvie found herself smiling, laughing along with everyone else. And then in the next second, she became very aware of what she was doing. It was as though as soon as she’d peeled those nylons off her legs, something had altered in her. Here she was taking pictures of Paul and his newly found teeth. Here she was eating an extra cupcake and drinking a third glass of wine.
When Charles arrived home from Maryland, Sylvie told him her weekend had been quiet and without incident. Later she asked a boy who lived down the road to show her how to upload the photos to a server so that Samara and her new husband, Chris, could view them. A few days after she e-mailed them off, her phone rang. A woman introduced herself as Tabitha Wyler, a wedding photographer. “I’m an acquaintance of Samara Johnson,” she explained. “Samara showed me the pictures you took of their wedding.”
“It was just for fun,” Sylvie said quickly. She wondered if she’d broken some sort of photographer code—maybe they had unions and she’d stolen a legitimate worker’s business. Then Tabitha cleared her throat and asked if Sylvie wanted to do it for more than fun. “You’re good,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to work for me.”
She needed an assistant, she explained, someone to help with the set-up shots, an extra pair of hands at the receptions. Most of the jobs were smaller affairs in Phoenixville and Elverson, Spring City and Gap and even Lancaster. “Most aren’t high-end,” Tabitha added. “I won’t be able to pay you much.”
“That’s fine,” Sylvie said fast.
The day before her first job, Sylvie was so nervous she sweated profusely through two T-shirts and kept dropping things. She fretted over her equipment. What if her camera stopped working? What if every picture she took turned out black and overexposed?
“They’re digital,” Charles reminded her when he came over—she’d told him by then about this increasingly foolish-sounding endeavor she’d gotten herself into. He pointed at the back of the camera. “You’ll be able to see exactly what you do in the little screen. But you knew that already.”
“Do you realize I’ve never had a proper job?” she cried.
Charles aimed the camera’s viewfinder at the back garden and snapped a picture of Joanna, who was standing near the pool, seemingly admiring the diving board. “Did I tell you I found the cleaning lady who found Dad?” Charles said after a moment.
Sylvie stood up straighter, caught off guard. “What?”
“I ran into the guard from Dad’s office who called the ambulance at this bar down the street. He told me where the cleaning lady was—she’s working in another building. I tried to look for her after Dad died, but no one would tell me where she was.”
“You did?” Sylvie asked. He had never told her this.
Charles ducked his head, shrugging it off. “So we went to her building, and the guard pointed her out to me. She was just coming through the lobby at the exact time we came through the double doors—it was like, I don’t know, fate. I was going to say something to her, but I didn’t. She had a kind face, though. Caring.”
“Well,” Sylvie said uncomfortably. “Imagine that.”
But it seemed to pacify something in Charles. Even though he would never get into it, even though he might not have been able to define it for himself, she finally was assured that he had felt great depths for his father. “She seemed caring,” Charles repeated.