She's Up to No Good(48)

Joe led the way, stopping to pick a few wildflowers. When we reached the foundation that had the recognizable remains of a real wall, he told me to sit, then posed me with the flowers, instructing me to put one leg up on the wall, then guided it to the exact angle he wanted with a gentle hand under my knee, before positioning my arms and turning my face to the side to shoot me in profile.

“Take your hair down,” he said, looking at me critically. I reached up and pulled it free from the ponytail holder. He ran his fingers through it, adjusting pieces. It felt oddly intimate, and I was suddenly shy. He stepped back and looked at me through the viewfinder but didn’t take the picture. “Relax your shoulders and tilt your head up toward the sun.” I did what he asked, and he looked again. I saw him shake his head from the corner of my eye, and he came over and sat on the wall by my foot. “Don’t be nervous.” I started to protest, but something in his demeanor stopped me. He was a professional, after all. “Tilt your head up and close your eyes.” I closed my eyes, leaning my head back. “Imagine the sun is washing away everything that’s bothering you. Anything you’re afraid of, it can’t touch you when the sun is on your face out here.”

I heard a dry leaf crunch under his foot as he stood, and I wondered for just a moment, with my eyes closed, my head tilted back, if he was going to kiss me.

Instead, I heard the snap of a shutter. “Perfect,” Joe breathed as he looked at the image on the camera’s screen. “Do you want to see it?”

I climbed down and went to him, where he offered me the camera. I was bathed in a beam of sunlight that created a circle around me where it came through the trees, and I looked ethereal, like a wood nymph in a serene yet sensual pose.

“How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get that”—I gestured toward the camera screen, then toward myself—“out of me.”

He smiled again. “That is you. I just capture what I see.”

I didn’t know what to say. That was what he saw when he looked at me? He put the lens cap on his camera and the strap around his neck. “Come on. The road isn’t far, and it’s lunchtime. I’ll transfer the shot to my phone after I call an Uber, and then you can put it on Instagram. Just tag me as the photographer.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE


December 1950


Boston, Massachusetts


“Let’s go see the lights on the Common,” Fred said. “My parents used to bring me into town to see them when I was a kid.”

“How gauchely gentile of them,” Evelyn said dryly, but she punctuated it with a wink. “Mine didn’t, even though we used to beg them to when our non-Jewish friends would talk about them.” Evelyn had met him at the South Street Diner for coffee, which led to hamburgers as a cup of coffee stretched into two, then three, and was then close enough to supper that they might as well stay. As long as they split the check, it wasn’t a date, and besides, he was engaged, and she was the next-best thing to it. She hadn’t intended to see him again, but after running into him three more times, always near the Simmons campus, she asked if he was following her.

“I have a feeling I’d meet the business end of that hat pin if I were.”

Evelyn shrugged. “Depends on my mood. I’ve got a mean right hook too.”

“I would expect no less.”

“What are you doing this far from home? Harvard is an awfully long walk and across the river.”

“I like long walks.”

Evelyn shot him a suspicious look. “In Boston. In December?”

“I don’t see you curled up by a fire.”

He had a point. She had established a loop that took her about three miles daily, four if the wind wasn’t too harsh or she felt like more. It was a way to keep her figure with the starchy campus food, but moreover she needed to move. She always had. And growing up by the water, she could stand the cold.

“Where are you from, anyway?”

“Plymouth.”

She shook her head. “Plymouth and Harvard. You’re insufferable, aren’t you?”

“You’re the one who keeps bringing up Harvard. I’m extremely modest. And my parents are absolutely frowned upon by the original families. My father was born here, but in Fall River, and my mother came as a baby from Russia.”

“How tragic.”

“I know. I can’t tell anyone at Harvard for the shame of it all.”

Evelyn peered at him to see if he was serious. He wasn’t.

“Where are you from?”

“Hereford.”

“Yet you don’t smell like fish. Look at us breaking stereotypes.”

“Are you this impertinent with everyone you meet?”

“Only the people I like.”

“And how do you know you like me? We’ve bumped into each other three times.”

“Four counting today. We’re practically an item.”

Rolling her eyes, Evelyn stopped walking and turned to face him. “Really now, this is too much. I told you I’m engaged and—”

He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender and interrupted her. “Don’t get your feathers all ruffled—I’m only teasing you.”