She smiled in spite of herself. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
Though Full Cup was one of the busiest coffee shops in the city, lulls occurred during the day. Midmorning and midafternoon were for the college students, white earbuds snaking up to their ears, laptops open, concentration intense. They could be demanding—too much caffeine made them impatient and snappy—but this afternoon the line at the counter was short, giving Jenna a chance to work on the shift schedule. Alexandra had just planned an impromptu surprise party—in the Bahamas, no less—for her sister and needed five days off at the end of the month. As the “cool” manager, the one people actually wanted to work for, Jenna had no choice but to rework the schedule.
She wedged herself, the store laptop, and the big scheduling binder into a booth in the back where she could see most of the store but was out of the way enough that she might be left alone for a few minutes if she was lucky. The back of the store was known as the gallery. A few times a year they asked artists in town to submit art to hang on the walls. Any type of art was accepted, even a few pieces she knew Addie—or for that matter Walsh—could do better.
As she opened the laptop and waited for it to power up, she focused on the fishing line–clock face–teddy bear conglomeration suspended from the ceiling. If it was art, she was Superwoman. Back in the day, she would have been willing to call most anything art, as long as it made the viewer feel something. Today, all that teddy bear nightmare made her feel was annoyed. But then again, that was something.
She slid her eyes left to an eight-by-ten photo hanging on the wall. Black and white, Ilford Galerie paper, skinny black frame, white mat. Simple, understated, nothing to draw the eye except the face in the photo. The old woman had her eyes closed, her lips curving upward, her head tilted back to catch the last rays of the sun as it dipped below the mountains in the west. Of course, you couldn’t see the mountains in the photo, but Jenna remembered the smell of the crisp air, the sting of the cold on her cheeks as she clicked the shutter, the way the wind funneled through the mountain pass. The photo was eight years old. Could Rickie, the woman Jenna had befriended out west, still be alive?
Finally, the laptop chugged to life and she dove into the job of figuring out how to get her best, most popular barista to the Bahamas for a week and balance the remaining baristas’ school schedules, family obligations, and need for shifts in her absence.
Between helping customers, cleaning up the mess from a flushed diaper in the bathroom—seriously? Who does that?—and searching for a missing bottle of raspberry-peppermint syrup, she finally finished the schedule. As she closed the laptop and stood, her phone buzzed with a text. She pulled it out and saw she’d missed several texts, all from Max.
I have news. Call me.
Then: I know you keep your phone on you at work. I need to talk to you.
The last one said: Now’s not the time to ignore me.
Before she could punch the button to call him, the phone buzzed again, this time with a call.
“I’m not ignoring you,” she said before he could unload on her. “I’m at work. What’s going on?”
“You got in.”
“Got in where?” She gestured to a waving Mario that she’d be just a minute.
“Halcyon.”
Jenna sat back down in the booth and leaned her head against the wall behind her. Mario held his hands up in frustration.
“How?” She ignored Mario’s well-practiced drama.
“A spot opened up and you got it. I may have pulled some strings, but I didn’t have to pull many. They loved what you sent.”
“But they were just shots of the girls . . . and trees . . .”
“Doesn’t matter. It got you in.”
“What about the money? I felt like an idiot even applying, knowing I couldn’t afford it.”
“All you have to do is get yourself here. Everything else is paid for.”
“How in—?”
“Believe it or not, there are wealthy art patrons who love to pay for people like you to go on retreats like this. Don’t ask too many questions. Just get yourself here by Friday. And don’t forget your camera.”
three
Jenna
Two hours later, Jenna was on her way home, the scent of roasted coffee beans and vanilla syrup saturating her clothes and skin. She propped her elbow on the edge of the open window and dug her fingers into her hair. Max was nothing if not abrupt. To the point. It was one of the things she loved about him. Well, loved or hated, depending on the situation.
Max was the head of the photography department at Belmont University and the only person who really knew her passion for photography. She’d met him at the Botanical Gardens in Nashville a couple years back. She noticed him watching her as she stooped over a pile of leaves, craning to catch the edge of a ray of sunlight.
“Can I help you?” she asked without looking up.
“Just wondering who taught you to get low like that. Under the light, I mean. It’s not how most people would do it.”
Jenna pulled her face away from the camera and shrugged. “I’m just playing around.”
“Not what it looks like to me.”
Since then, they met every month or so at the gardens and other places around town to take photos together and discuss her “creative future,” as he called it. They always went somewhere the kids could come, which limited their excursions to an hour, tops. They’d met at the downtown library a few times. At the top
