The Photographer - Mary Carter (best romance ebooks .txt) 📗

well enough to sing it to me. It was a sign of our strong connection. My mother had given me the first name Delta to go with my last name, Dawn—her tribute to Tanya Tucker. I wasn’t proud of the name, but I couldn’t separate myself from it. And Amelia singing it to me, it was like she understood all that. She understood me. She recognized me.

“Amelia thinks she can sing,” Fritz said. “Too bad she didn’t grow up in Nashville instead of Pittsburgh.” His comment was likely meant as a joke, but came out sounding slightly hostile. Amelia didn’t appear to hear him. She reached into her purse and pulled out four crisp twenty-dollar bills.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she would pay me. I’d viewed myself as doing the Straubs a favor. “No, I shouldn’t…” A familiar ache pulsed behind my sternum until I looked into Amelia’s eyes, where I saw real affection. She didn’t look down on me.

“Delta!” she cried, pushing the bills into my hand. “La Divina!”

CHAPTER THREE

The ringing bells slowly faded on my train ride home to Crown Heights and disappeared entirely by the time I entered my apartment. My cat, Eliza, a champagne-colored Burmese, greeted me at the door. I’d found her at a shelter in Orlando ten years earlier, right before moving to New York. She had uncommon intelligence, sensitivity, and the ability to judge character. I considered her to be my closest friend. She circled the room, then leapt up to the back of the sofa, walked across it like a gymnast, and jumped back down. After hanging my coat and placing my camera equipment in its cubby, I filled Eliza’s personalized ceramic bowl (Eliza in a cursive font) with dry cat food and placed the bowl on the floor of my kitchen. While she was eating, I used a Swiffer to dust the bookcase, the coffee table, the small dining table, the end tables, and the kitchen counter.

My apartment faced north, into an interior courtyard. From the living room windows, I could see a sliver of sky above. Concrete dominated the courtyard below, with a few plants and flowers dotted around the perimeter, the ratio of planted to unplanted square feet being extremely low. A committee had been formed in an effort to spruce up the courtyard, but none of the penny-pinching residents in the building were willing to spend any money on it.

The five lamps in my living room provided moderate cheer at night, but during the day, they called attention to the absence of natural light and had the opposite effect. When I first moved into the apartment six years earlier, I’d painted the walls pale lavender, but had used a cheap paint. A full-spectrum paint, at three times the cost, would have reflected a broader range of light and brightened the atmosphere. As it was, the flat, low light lent the walls a muddy cast. I found it ironic that I didn’t have the money to realize my artistic vision, while so many ordinary people did.

I turned on the television, then crossed to the kitchen for a glass of wine. One of my clients had recently given me a brass-and-marble wine opener as a thank-you gift. My clients often give me high-end gifts that are not in keeping with my lifestyle. (I had little storage in my apartment, and no space for luxury items.) I had stopped drinking about a year earlier, but recently, because of the exquisite wine opener, I’d started drinking again. Just a glass or two once in a while.

I opened a new bottle of malbec. The weight of the wine opener in my hand gave me immense pleasure. I looked around the apartment for an appropriate display area for an in-home bar. The lowest shelf of the bookcase, which was also the top of the built-in cabinets, would most closely approximate counter height and was the only one that had clearance for a bar display. A second idea: I could use the peninsula of my kitchen counter for the bar. Finally I landed on the most sensible answer. In my office (the smaller section of my L-shaped living room), I’d been using a rattan table with a glass top for odds and ends. In its present capacity, it was underutilized, so I moved it to the living area relatively near the entry, so you would appreciate it when you walked through the door.

Other bar-related presents from clients included: an ice ball press kit, a handblown tortoise ice bucket with gold tongs, a brass squirrel bottle opener (you use the squirrel’s tail to open the bottle). I arranged the ice bucket, the tongs, and the bottle opener next to the wine opener on the rattan table (along with my set of six wineglasses and six double old-fashioned glasses). I’d never returned any of the gift items, because I believed that one day I would have parties and entertain. One day I’d be the host, not the guest. One day, friends would linger at my home until the wee hours of the morning, having meaningful conversations. The presents would all contribute to those future gatherings.

I craved a clearly defined role. I wanted to know where to place my body, where to step, where to sit down, where to lie down. I didn’t have many personal connections. The ones I had were soft with no teeth.

After changing into my most comfortable lounge outfit, silky pants and a satin camisole, I poured a glass of wine and brought it with me to the office, which was furnished with an IKEA desk and chair. On my monitor, I saw an open folder with thumbnails displayed, including the ones of Jasper and Robert that I’d shown Amelia and Fritz earlier that evening.

The prior night, I’d worked until 3 A.M. in an attempt to salvage the photos of Jasper’s disastrous birthday party. In several shots, he had been yelling, his mouth wide open. It hadn’t been difficult to combine the