Sylvie took a deep breath and took photos at her first wedding job. She and Tabitha, a round, chatty woman who immediately put Sylvie at ease, took pictures of the wedding at the family’s farm, in a pumpkin patch. And she did more after that. Weddings that were simple lunches in people’s backyards. Ones that were traditional, where the family prayed before the meal and the bride wore white without irony. There was one that was more like a sorority party, the eleven bridesmaids climbing into an enormous white limo, posing for pictures with little plastic shot glasses raised, all of them smoking cigarettes and fixing one another’s hair. At a few weddings she photographed, the wedded couple didn’t seem very happy, the marriage quite possibly forced. Those were always the hardest to do; when sorting through their images, she wished she knew how to use Photoshop. If she could create smiles on their faces, maybe they’d change their minds and decide to be happy.
The weddings got to her. She cried as the bride walked down the aisle with her father; she encouraged single girls to rush to the front and catch the bouquet. She found herself wishing that she and James had had a traditional wedding instead of going off to Italy and getting married there alone, estranging their families even more. She sometimes felt such strong pangs for James that she had to duck into the bathroom and press her forehead against the cool, tiled walls. Sometimes she penned letters to James in her head, explaining her new job. She wondered what James would think of her if he suddenly walked back into her life, robustly alive. Would he think she’d changed? Would he recognize her?
And what would Scott say, if, or when, he came back? She hoped he would think she’d changed. She wondered if some of these changes she’d made were with him in mind.
After the sixth or seventh wedding she worked, she woke up and realized that the heaviness in the base of her stomach had lifted. She folded James’s old clothes and sent them to the Salvation Army. She bought new sheets and pillows for her bed. She drove to Philadelphia and walked to Jeweler’s Row, dropping her ring onto the counter of the first store she came upon. The jeweler, a large Hasidic man, used a loupe to check the color and the carat weight and called everyone else on the street trying to come up with an accurate price. She enjoyed the anonymity of it. No one gawked at her, asking why she was getting rid of something so large and pretty.
Then she went into James’s old office and put all his books in boxes. She called an antiques dealer to appraise James’s desk and bookshelves—a mid-century designer had made them, so they were probably worth some money. When the dealer walked into the house, his eyes boggled at her grandfather’s items, the furniture in the living room and the oil paintings on the walls. It wasn’t the first time someone had done this; Sylvie could practically see him making calculations in his head, already counting the money. She’d always balked at selling anything of her grandfather’s, but something in her slowly began to turn. She called an appraiser named Florence, who had known her parents and had helped Sylvie sell off some of their furnishings when both of them died. Florence wandered around the house, making notes in a book, pressing her pencil eraser to her lips. She ran her fingers over his books and paintings. She opened drawers in the kitchen and smiled at their old dishes and silverware. There was no point in moving all of this stuff out of the house and breaking up what was here, Florence concluded. It all was worth more together, an encapsulated life.
“It is amazing how preserved this place is,” Florence said with a sigh when Sylvie saw her out. “Your grandfather would be very proud.”
After Florence left, Sylvie sat in the empty living room with the lights off, feeling almost as though she was saying her good-byes now. As she heaved another sigh, she sensed a presence behind her and turned. The light shimmered and shifted, and suddenly he was there, really there, all cigar smoke and mustache and twinkling eyes.
“Hello, Charlie Roderick,” Sylvie whispered. He lingered there, light waves and ozone, watching her. Tears came to her eyes. It had been so long since she’d said his name out loud. She hoped he thought she’d done the right thing. She hoped he would forgive her, too. But before she could ask him, he was gone.