She looked around the store, her eyes suddenly registering yellow tags on everything. “What? Why?”
He reached into his pocket and brought out his iPhone, holding it up lens side out. “We’re not really needed any more,” he said. He was old enough that the suggestion of retirement fit naturally over his general appearance—the patches on his corduroy coat, the thick bifocals. But his choice of words suggested several feelings mixed together, and she wondered what would replace the little store next to the Teleflora.
She picked up a Nikon F from a crowded table in front of the counter: it was in terrific condition, sharp and clean. “Oh, Kurt, for pity’s sake,” she said when she saw the bright “50% Off!” tag hanging from the rewind knob: a vision of Kurt’s garage, swollen with equipment he’d never use or need, had begun rapidly establishing a foothold in her imagination. Dusty tripods and frames were huddled together there in the shadows, conspiring to make her feel sad.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m ready for some kind of new adventure. Hauling all the big stuff in back out to the dumpster’s going to be the worst part.”
She insisted, over his protests, on paying him (“Seriously, you’re doing me a favor,” he said); he made sure she allowed him to arrange the transport. It all sat in a pile next to mops and buckets for a month or so, but that first autumn with both kids gone she registered for night classes at Mount San Antonio College and enrolled in two the following spring: Basic Digital and Film Photography, and Laboratory Studies: Black and White. Older students are often the best students. They know they may not have another chance to learn.
By May she’d built a little darkroom in the garage. It was a good way to spend her mornings dabbling, waiting for Ed to come home from work. He had another year to go before he retired from Charter Oak. He was working half days now and they’d cut his caseload in half. He enjoyed these unspooling days; his clients got more of him, because he had more to give. One day there’d be no more clients at all; he’d see his last one, say goodbye to everyone, and then set out for the great unknowable beyond. It wouldn’t be long at all.
*
By the time they got to Iowa they’d been on the road for over a year, Ed at the wheel of the RV he’d christened the Greener Pastures. They spent their first summer in Ashland, Oregon, in a bungalow Ed’s old classmate George Plummer planned to put on the market in the fall. He, too, was retiring; he’d traipse all over Europe one last time and then move into a condo smack dab in the middle of Portland. “I had a good run here but I still feel kinda cramped,” he told Ed, who smiled all night listening to George spin stories about his practice in southern Oregon: he ran a rehab that also had outposts in Medford and Eugene. He was selling those, too. Condos in Portland were fetching enormous prices.
When George got back home in September, he put up the FOR SALE sign (“You have to see Romania before you die,” he told them), and they headed east: they hit campgrounds in Montana and North Dakota, but it was the Black Hills in late autumn where they began to first feel vaguely called toward something. It wasn’t the adventure that they’d needed after all: it was the light, and the quiet, and the space. Emily’s cameras glutted themselves on streams and shadows, but the film had to hibernate in canisters in her backpack.
They found the Collins place listed in an Advertiser at a diner the following spring—they were in Missouri, but the real estate listings were from all over the region.
Quaint family farm in quiet location, it said. Farming! The places life takes you if you’ll only let it. It took a few months to get all the particulars ironed out, but in the end it felt easy, natural. When they called, Abby arranged for her parents’ things to be sent to them from a U-Stor off the 60 in Diamond Bar; they’d be here soon. But this week there was only the first truck: a table, a bed, the sofa, books and bookcases, and the film equipment from the garage, finally finding its way to a home in a cellar underneath the most darling little farmhouse in central Iowa.
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