Never Coming Back(67)

“Don’t make the bartender feel bad, Sunshine,” Brown said.

“Oh, I’m sure the bartender knows his way around a piece of wood,” Sunshine said, and then blushed. “Oops. Sorry, bartender.”

Adirondack Hardware had set up a Lumber Days photo booth inside their store, next to a display of decorated fake Christmas trees, before which Brown stood shaking his head, muttering about plastic trees made in China, for sale right here in the Adirondacks, what was the world coming to, it was like a silent insurgency, a dagger in the heart of the tree farm industry, and here on Lumber Days weekend, for God’s sake.

“Let’s dress up in period lumberjack costume and get our photos taken in the photo booth,” Sunshine said. She was a sucker for period costume, British, especially—Merchant-Ivory films, movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels—but she would settle for Americana if she had to. Pioneers, Old Sturbridge Village, covered wagons, the hallowed days of Adirondack guides and the estates they served. A trunk next to the booth spilled over with homespun long dresses, breeches and vests and waistcoats and fake mustaches and large lace-trimmed hats. A mishmash of generalized pioneer-ish finery. I pulled on a linsey-woolsey apron.

“Check out my linsey-woolsey,” I said.

“You only put that on because you wanted to say the words ‘linsey-woolsey,’” Brown said. “Admit it.”

It was true. Linsey-woolsey. Said often enough, it blended together into the exact sound and feel of the material it was named for. Coarse and strong. Built to last. Linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey. Linsey-woolsey could be a girl’s name, a proper name that appeared on a birth certificate but from which the woolsey was left off in real life, leaving Linsey to stand alone. Linsey. A pretty name. A name that reminded me of the gauzy white embroidered shirt my mother used to be so fond of, the shirt she was wearing in the photo we had christened The Mystery.

The bartender put on a fringed buckskin vest, jammed a Stetson on his head and held his arm out to me. There was only one stool in the photo booth, so I sat on it and he stood behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. The photo countdown began to flash.

“Look straight into the mirror and look stern,” I said. “Like an old-school lumberjack thug.”

We simultaneously frowned at the mirror. My hands suddenly looked un-lumberjack-like, too smooth, too unworn. I looked for linsey-woolsey pockets to jam them into, but then the flash went off and I had missed the first photo. I stuck my unworn hands behind my back but the bartender was standing there. The next flash went off. I sat on my hands for the third, which wasn’t right either, and finally the bartender pulled me up off the stool and wrapped his arms around me. “Think thug,” he said, and the fourth flash went off.

We took off our period costumes and waited for the photo strip to emerge into the metal cage. Sunshine and Brown were arguing over who should get to wear the buckskin vest next. Brown claimed it was an outer garment suitable for males only.

“I don’t disagree,” Sunshine said, “but the fact is, I would look cute in that vest. Plus, I’m a cancer survivor.”

“Let’s do survivor smiles in our photos,” Brown said.

“Only if I get to wear the vest.”

The photo booth plunked out our photos and the bartender and I studied them.

“These are terrible,” I said. “Look at me.”

“These are great,” the bartender said. “Look at you.”

Every photo of me was disarray: me frowning at my hands, me hiding my hands, me blurry mid-turn, me swallowed up by the bartender’s arms.

“Good God, Winter,” Brown said, peering at the photo strip. “What are you, two years old? Can you not sit still?”

But I had quit looking at myself in the photos and was looking instead at the bartender. Unlike me, he was not fidgeting or trying to hide his hands. He was not looking straight into the mirror, nor did he look stern. In each photo he was looking down at me, and his face had a certain look on it. Not of laughter, or impatience, or forbearance in a let’s-get-this-over-with kind of way. None of those words applied. I looked from the photo to him, the real him, and that look was still on his face. Though Brown was standing next to us, the sound of his voice and the laughter in it receded. The feel of the buckskin vest brushing my arm as Sunshine put it on was barely there. The bartender looked at me and I looked at the bartender.

“Chris?”

That was the sound of my voice, almost inaudible even though it was me talking. Me saying his real name for the first time. He nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”

And it was. It was him. Him with that look on his face, nodding and now the beginnings of a smile, because was I looking at him the way he was looking at me? As if I loved him?

Not as if.

The world rose around us again: Sunshine and Brown standing next to Chris and me, both of them silent and watching, knowing that something had just happened. A group of teenagers bent over the trunk of dress-up clothes, waiting their turn for the photo booth. Johnny Cash sang about a ring of fire on the store PA system. My mother’s words floated into my head: Bullshit. Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.

The car heater blasted on the way home, drowning out conversation, not that any of us were talking. Much had already been said, and most of it silent. I held Chris’s hand in the backseat of Sunshine and Brown’s station wagon but I didn’t look at him because my mind was filled with fifty-fifty and everything it meant in that moment: I had found him, I didn’t want to let him go, and I didn’t want him to live through what I was living through, either. Flip sides, same coin.