My husband took my camera on a Tuesday morning in April, wearing the same faded hoodie he’d had since before his back gave out. He leaned against the counter with that particular posture he’d developed over the years, the one that said he’d already decided the answer was yes and was just waiting for me to confirm it. “Going out past Buckeye Lake,” he said.
“Thought I’d try to get some bird shots. Practice.”
I looked at him then. Glenn Mercer, 52, smiling like charm was something you could keep using indefinitely regardless of its declining effectiveness.
I had a retirement party shoot to edit and coffee that had gone slightly wrong in the machine and a whole morning of work ahead of me. The camera bag sat on the chair by the door where I always kept it. “That’s my work camera,” I said.
“I know. I’ll be careful.”
I should have said no. What I said instead was that the batteries were charged and he should leave the settings alone.
He gave me the grin that had once meant something and walked out the door. I heard the truck back out of the driveway and then I heard nothing except the house settling into its ordinary Tuesday morning quiet. I went back to my desk in the spare bedroom, which I called my studio when I was being generous and which was technically just a spare bedroom with a monitor and a filing cabinet and seventeen years of accumulated equipment I’d bought piece by piece as the business grew.
I was editing photos from Carl Reinhart’s retirement party. Sixty-five years old and finally done with a job he’d spent forty years tolerating, his wife grabbing his hand outside the banquet hall with an expression that told you everything about what they were both feeling. Those are the moments I’m good at catching.
The ones that happen in the half-second before people remember the camera is there and compose themselves. Around noon the laptop pinged. Adobe Cloud syncing.
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