She eyed me a few times, but even half of that recording of Drowsy Maggie was more than I could manage and remain on an even keel.
“That was, uh. My dad’s band.” I slammed old cold coffee, just for something to do.
“Oh.” She loaded that with a wealth of meaning. “The sad bits.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought your dad was French?”
I laughed. “Yeah. It’s…well, not all that complicated, actually. He was born in France, moved to Newfoundland as a young man. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all played the fiddle, more for fun and entertainment than anything, and my granddad taught Dad. Then, when Dad moved to Canada, he picked up the Cape Breton style of fiddling, ended up in a band that moved him to Dublin, joined a different band, this one proper Irish music, and that one blew up in Europe and the UK, parts of Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Never really got picked up here, though, for whatever reason. He met my mum after a gig in Christchurch, and…the rest is history.”
She hummed. “There’s a lot covered in that phrase, ‘the rest is history,’ I think.”
“Yeah, sure.” I tried for easy breezy. “We’ve all got that shit, though, yeah? No sense digging into it all. Just a bloody bunch of sad stuff that doesn’t make for good storytelling.”
“Meaning, off-limits.”
“I dunno about off-limits, exactly, just…don’t see the point in talking about it.”
She just nodded and didn’t push it. Conversation lapsed for a while after that.
“I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories, Errol. I’m sorry.”
I rolled my shoulder, left hand out the window, diving and rising in the air current. “Couldn’t have known.”
We stopped for food in Davenport, but it was still too early to stop for the day, and something about that weird issue with the music had chilled the fervor of our chemical combustibility. We drove, and drove. Signs for Dubuque, which I felt was maybe in Iowa.
Late evening. Sunset over cornfields.
“Hey, Errol?”
“Yeah?”
She pointed at a dirt track through a cornfield as we passed it, the sunset perfectly aligned with the road, a spreading umbrella of oak and cottonwood interrupting the corn. “I want to go shoot that.”
“All right,” I said. “Sounds good to me.”
I brought us to a halt and reversed down the shoulder, pulled onto the dirt road.
When I halted and shut off the engine, we both ducked in back to sort through our photography gear; I just needed my Nikon, she needed a handful of rolls of film, which she shoved into the pocket of her skirt; I hadn’t realized her skirt even had pockets.
We spent a quiet several minutes each wandering the road, snapping shots. I went into the corn rows a ways, knelt to capture a solar flare through the nodding heads while Poppy focused more on the dirt road and the sunset with the stand of trees as a frame and focal point.
After a while, I joined her on the road. “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
“Okay?” She eyed me, and I had a feeling she was expecting some kind of a sexual game, but things were still a bit odd, strained—memories tend to linger, for me, and leave a stain of bitter pain, and I think my reaction set something off in her.
I wasn’t sure what, and I didn’t like it, and I wished she’d have just picked another playlist so we could have carried on in mere sexual tension rather than bizarre emotional tautness and confusion.
I handed her my Nikon. “Switch?”
She grinned. “Hell, yeah. I’ve always wanted an opportunity to play with one of these. I had a Canon Rebel when I first moved to New York, but it got stolen on the subway and I never got around to saving up to replace it, and I’m too stubborn to ask Mom.”
“Rebels are a decent starter kit,” I said. “And really, a professional can get a good shot no matter the camera. The photographer makes the camera, not the other way around.”
She glanced at the shot counter on her Minolta. “Hold on, I’ve got three shots left on this roll, and then you can have a fresh roll to work on.”
She looked around for something to shoot, saw me, smirked. Lifted the camera and snapped one of me before I could react. Backed up a step, two, tilted the camera sideways and bent to get all of me in the frame. I stood for it, letting my Nikon dangle loosely at my side, sunglasses up on my head. She closed in again, got a close-up of my face to finish the roll. Pulled the used roll out.
