Snapshots

by Pamela Browning

  “I can’t picture you anywhere but Columbia,” Rick said. “And what’s with this Stott guy pulling that kind of crap when you’ve been so helpful to him?” He recalled she’d been instrumental in hiring Byron in the first place, and he felt indignant on her behalf.

  She shrugged in resignation but brightened immediately. “Old friends are the best friends. I should keep that in mind.” As he was still computing what this meant in relation to the two of them, she stood. “Say, since we’ve got company coming today, I’d better get rolling. I’m still a mess.”

  Before he could comment, Trista was rinsing her plate off in the sink. “I’ll be down to start the shrimp boiling after I get dressed. You could start cutting up cabbage for the slaw if you don’t have anything else to do.” Then she hurried upstairs to get ready for their guests.

  Rick was thankful that he’d invited the Doyles. They would provide a much-needed respite from the one-on-one tension between him and Trista. Maybe hanging out with other people for a while was just what they needed.

  Shortly before noon, Stanley and Luella, along with their two kids, Daria and Isaac, arrived at the cottage in Stanley’s SUV. Trista, dressed casually in khaki shorts and a red-andwhite-striped polo shirt, greeted them at the door with Rick. She was all smiles and delight at seeing Luella again and meeting the two children.

  Luella had contributed a basket of crispy fried chicken and a huge chocolate sheet cake. She was exactly as Rick remembered her—tall and reedy, with snapping dark eyes sparkling with good humor. Daria was the image of her mother, and Isaac was a perpetual-motion machine. The boy and Dog took to each other right away, and as soon as Rick produced a Frisbee, the two of them took off for the beach.

  The adults, accompanied by Daria, who had brought a book to read, settled on the porch overlooking the dunes. The adults occupied wicker rockers, and Daria appropriated the hammock. Trista chatted with Daria about the book, which was Anne of Green Gables, one of her own childhood favorites, and later she carried in a pitcher of fresh-made cherry Kool-Aid for Daria and herself; Rick, Stanley and Luella drank beer, while Isaac was interested in neither food nor drink for the time being.

  At first they talked about old times and the changes that had been wrought by the recent development of Tappany Island. Soon, however, Isaac churned up the porch steps to beg his sister to come play with Dog, and Daria wasn’t hard to convince. The two of them ran down toward the water, where Dog was loping back and forth, waiting for the Frisbee to miraculously reappear.

  “Kids,” said Stanley after a long drag on his beer. “They run us ragged most of the time.”

  “Oh, now, Stanley,” Luella responded with an affectionate glance. “What would our lives be without them?”

  “Peaceful? Quiet?” he asked hopefully.

  “You wouldn’t like that and you know it,” Luella retorted in her easy Low Country drawl. And to Trista, “He complains a lot, but he’s just an old softie.”

  “So, Luella,” Trista said with interest, “tell me how you and Stanley met.”

  “It was in church,” Luella said, tooking pleased. “In April. The azaleas and dogwoods were blooming like in a scene from a springtime wonderland. After the service, I walked out behind the church to admire the blossoms, and I started to sneeze from all the pollen.”

  Stanley grinned at her, sharing the memory. “I walked up and offered her my handkerchief. And that was it.” He laughed.

  “I didn’t even know him,” Luella continued. “I thought he was mighty handsome, and I was grateful for the handkerchief. I told him I’d wash it and give it back to him the next Sunday.”

  “She was new at church. I’d never seen her before and was trying to figure out how I could find out her name, when I noticed her sneezing up a storm in the garden,” Stanley said.

  Luella leaned forward, obviously enjoying the telling of this tale. “I’d just started to attend services there with my grandmother, who needed me to drive her. I spotted Stanley in the front pew that morning and couldn’t take my eyes off him for even a minute. I kept forgetting his handkerchief for several Sundays. Only, I didn’t forget it at all. All my excuses for why I hadn’t brought it gave us a chance to talk.”

  “I was pretty sure she’d lost that danged hankie, and good riddance. It served its purpose,” Stanley said.

  Luella laughed. “Pretty soon I was begging Granny to let me drive her to Wednesday-night services and prayer meetings and covered-dish suppers in the hope of seeing Stanley every chance I got, and her increased social life was taking a toll on her. Thank goodness Stanley proposed in short order.”

  “I had to, or Lu would have drug that poor old lady to and from church so much it wore her out.” Stanley slapped his bony knee and laughed again.

  Luella turned toward Trista. “You’ve never been married, Trista, or have you?”

  Trista shook her head, avoiding Rick’s eyes. “Engaged once. In a serious relationship a couple of times, but nothing ever jelled. If you know what I mean.”

  “Sometimes it’s not easy to find the right person,” Luella agreed. “No point in settling.”

  “Hey, let’s go play with the kids,” Rick said, hoping to deflect all serious discussion.

  “No reason we get to sit on the porch in the shade,” Stanley said with mock resignation. “We might as well all be equally overheated and miserable.”

  Trista divested herself of her sandals at the high-tide line and looped her hair back in a ponytail. Rick watched her, bemused by the delicate arch of her instep, the curve of her calves. If he had married her in the first place, would he still be looking at her with desire? With longing? Or would those feelings have eroded over the course of their marriage? She saw him studying her and smiled slightly. I would never have fallen out of love with you, he said to her in his mind. He wished he could say the words for real, and maybe someday he would.

  The children were clamoring for Rick to throw the Frisbee, and when Isaac tossed it, he caught it neatly. “Okay, kids,” Rick shouted. “Show me your stuff.”

  The children raced up and down the beach, avoiding the surf like little sandpipers. Isaac delighted in tossing the Frisbee to Dog, who ran with everyone shouting behind. The only person to whom Dog would relinquish the Frisbee was Rick, and Trista charged that this was because Rick let Dog sleep on his bed. Finally, after Stanley managed to get his shoes sloshed by a wave, Daria declared that she was ready for food, and Luella said she was hungry, too.

  Trista, fit from running, didn’t want to quit, but after Isaac joined Daria in pleading for their mother’s fried chicken, Rick declared the game over. “We don’t want to tire these kids out. We want them to have enough strength left to help clean up.”

  The children immediately objected, enlisting a willing ally in their mother. “Hey, that’s for you and Stanley to do,” Luella informed Rick, which only made Stanley laugh and pull her close so he could smooch her on the cheek.

  “We got better things to do, honey,” he said. “Like maybe after we tire these kids out and they go to sleep at home.”

  Luella wasn’t embarrassed at her husband’s obvious desire for her. “Big talker,” she said, but she hugged him before they all started back toward the cottage together.

  As they walked, Rick slung a friendly arm across Trista’s shoulders. “Having fun?” he asked. He was surprised when she leaned into him; it felt natural and right.

  “Of course,” she replied, smiling up at him. Then Daria yelled, “Race everybody to the porch steps!” and Trista sprinted away, the rest of them in close pursuit.

  Trista won, Isaac howled when he stepped on a sliver of metal and they all trooped inside to inspect his cut, which was fortunately not serious.

  As Luella and Stanley supervised their children, as he and Trista set out the chicken and cold boiled shrimp and fresh-made slaw buffet-style on the kitchen table, Rick noticed Trista observing him. He smiled at her, halfway expecting her to react like Martine, who would have
tossed him an offhand grin if he was lucky. But Trista smiled back so that her eyes lit up, and he detected romantic overtones in her expression.

  Perhaps he was mistaken, though, because she immediately began to arrange watermelon pickles in a milk-glass dish, not paying attention to him at all.

  Chapter 15: Trista

  2004

  Click: We are sitting on the porch after dinner with the Doyles, and Isaac snapped this picture with his mother’s digital camera. Rick’s arm is around the back of my chair, but it’s an awkward posture, as if he wants to lower it to curve around my shoulders but doesn’t. I appear genuinely happy and relaxed, leaning toward Rick. My hand is almost, but not quite, touching his knee.

  As Rick and I played on the beach that Saturday with Stanley, Luella and their children, it was as if I unwound inside. I was beginning to understand that I had been taking Rick’s pain into myself, letting it knot somewhere deep inside me until I was near to choking with it. Adding my own uncertainty about what was presently going on between Rick and me, I was awash in misgivings. Not good.

  I’d spent a restless night after Rick had said all those things to me in the kitchen the day before. I was incredulous, furious, stunned while he was saying them. At first I’d reacted as though he were blaming me for everything that had gone wrong, but then I understood that he was blaming himself as well. Afterward, I lay alone in my bed, worried that I wouldn’t be able to act natural after what we’d said to each other, and we were expecting the Doyles for a picnic the next day besides. In the end, I decided that having company over was a good thing.

  Do you know how, when you have guests, you put them first? Well, my reservations and doubts about Rick dissolved that day in the pleasant ambience so often engendered by compatible people. The six of us ate at the round table on the porch, laughed at the funny little things the kids said and talked about old times. Later, Luella and Stanley sat in the living room with us while Isaac and Daria munched on Gummi Bears and worked together on a jigsaw puzzle on the floor nearby, just as Rick, Martine and I had done many years ago.

  After promising that we’d all do it again someday before too long, the Doyles drove off. Rick and I went around the cottage picking up glasses, which was when I discovered Daria’s book, forgotten in the hammock when they left. Of course I immediately called Luella on her cell phone to let her know I’d found it, and she said they’d try to stop by the next day after church. If not then, Stanley would pick up the book when he delivered the mail on Tuesday.

  After Luella and I concluded our conversation, Rick came into the kitchen and said, “How about another piece of that wonderful chocolate cake that Luella left?” His tone was so normal, his expression so bland, that I took heart from it. I figured we were back on an even keel, that things were easy between us again.

  “Sure,” I said. “Make mine a small one.”

  We carried our cake out on the porch, sat on the wicker chairs and studied the lights of a distant freighter, trying to imagine where it was going.

  “Istanbul,” I said, naming the place that had sounded the most far away and exotic of all the cities in the world when I was a kid.

  “Timbuktu,” Rick suggested.

  I didn’t state what both of us were thinking, which was that if Martine were present, she’d have said Bangkok, the place she always mentioned when we played the “Where is that freighter going?” game.

  “You know what I thought about on the beach today? When I saw you kick off your shoes?” Rick said.

  I shook my head.

  “Our sixth-grade class picnic,” he said. “When your sandal broke.”

  I remembered, the memory flooding back. “You took it to be repaired,” I replied. At as much risk as a sixth-grader’s mind could conceive, I thought but didn’t say.

  “I watched you crying to yourself, sitting apart from everyone, and I couldn’t bear your sadness. I would have done anything I could to make things better.”

  I wasn’t sure how to reply. “Thank you,” I said finally. “How did you pay for it?” I asked, since I’d always wondered.

  “I had some birthday money in my pocket. It didn’t cost much.”

  We usually hadn’t carried much more than lunch money to school. I was silent, remembering how Rick must have run through the crowded city streets, entered the shoe shop and pushed my shoe across the counter. Then, probably worried that the teacher would call a buddy check and find him missing, he’d waited for it to be fixed, counting out wrinkled one-dollar bills when it was ready.

  “That was the day I recognized that there was something new between us,” I ventured. “Over and above loyalty to the ILTs, I mean.”

  “Yes,” he said, picking up my hand and inspecting it. “I felt it, too.”

  “What did you think it was?”

  “Something extraordinary,” he said in a low voice. “But I was an eleven-year-old boy and didn’t have words to put to it.”

  I ate no more cake. In my mind I was shut out of my classmates’ games, worried that I’d ruined my favorite pair of shoes. And I was picturing Rick as the prince who had come to my rescue.

  We sat silently, holding hands, and left the porch only when a damp fog rolled off the ocean. Once inside I pulled the doors closed behind us, and when I looked out at the beach, I saw that stars were beginning to show themselves in the sky.

  I totted up the fragile happiness we had accrued on that day, hoping to prolong it by including Rick in my personal and private reverie, but then I caught my breath. Rick had moved in behind me and was standing so near that I felt the warmth of his body. His arms slid around me, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, our wavy reflections stared back at me from the darkening glass, Rick serious and me—well, I thought I was kind of dopey looking, like someone who had just awakened. Which in a way perhaps I had.

  “You and I have unfinished business,” Rick said into my ear.

  I rested my head against his chin. “I’m at a loss how I’m supposed to feel about this,” I said.

  “Tris,” he said carefully, “remember that night after the prom? After Martine had gone up to bed?”

  I turned within the circle of his arms. “How could I forget it?” I asked quietly. “Ever?”

  He reached up and tipped a light finger along my jawline.

  “I wish I’d had the skill to explain my misgivings after we made love. I thought I’d ruined everything. Overwhelming emotions surfaced that night, and I was totally unable to handle them. They all but immobilized me, Tris. Maybe it’s no excuse, but that’s the way it was for me.”

  I didn’t doubt Rick’s sincerity and I certainly didn’t disbelieve what he was saying. We’d only been eighteen years old, after all. “You could have talked to me,” I said helplessly.

  “We didn’t discuss such things then.”

  “We talked about everything,” I said. “About getting a period and what a jockstrap was for and how some people we knew were having sex.”

  “We never personalized it,” he said.

  I realized he was right, but that didn’t make any of it easier to bear.

  “Anyway,” Rick went on, “I endured a lot of sleepless nights that summer.” His face was pale underneath his tan; this lent him a vulnerability, a sadness.

  Suddenly, this was too much to bear. “Don’t tell me these things. Don’t.”

  “We can talk about it now,” he said. “We proved that last night. There’s nothing—and no one—to stop us.”

  I considered this. “I was devastated when you ignored me for the rest of that summer,” I said. He seemed thunderstruck at this admission, though I wasn’t sure why. Surely, since we’d always been so tied into each other’s thoughts, on some level he must have known what I was going through.

  He swallowed, inhaled a deep breath. “Tris, all that summer I felt so guilty that I’d betrayed your parents’ trust. I was terrified that if we kept on sleeping together, you might get pregnant.”

  “We could h
ave taken precautions.”

  “Sometimes they don’t work.”

  “I understood what to do,” I said. “I’d heard other girls talk about getting birth control pills, being fitted for a diaphragm.”

  “I didn’t want to put our futures in jeopardy.”

  Of course. I should have known that Rick would have always looked after me. He was my protector, the knight who had ridden to my rescue, but I still was determined for him to know how I was—and who I was—in that long-ago summer.

  “I didn’t care about any of that. I—I longed for you. I ached for you. I couldn’t bear not being wanted after—after—”

  The expression in Rick’s eyes made me feel as if I were melting from the inside out and reminded me of my sexual awakening on that night so long ago, when I learned what it meant to feel pure wanton lust. My heart quickened, my pulse rushed in my ears and I lifted my face to his.

  Rick slowly lowered his lips to mine, seeking, infusing me with a sense of inevitability. As we kissed, my spine relaxed and allowed me to settle against him so that my breasts rounded against his chest. I returned his kiss with passion, and I longed for nothing so much as for him to rain sweet kisses all over my face, down the side of my throat, pushing aside the open neck of my blouse.

  It would have been fine with me if he’d never let me go, but he relaxed his hold on me. “I’m not going to make any more mistakes,” he said. “Somehow in the next few days we have to decide if we’ll continue as friends or become more than that. I’ve already made my choice, and you know what it is. I want you, Trista. But you’re the one who has the final say-so.”

  “I—” I started to say, but Rick placed a cautionary finger across my lips.

  “Careful, let’s not go there yet,” he said.

  Somehow, though, I don’t know why this didn’t feel like another rejection. Instead, I felt cared for and protected, as if my wants and needs were as important as his. He kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Good night, sweet Tilt,” he said softly.