His Favorite Shirt novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Slack Water

On Monday evening Nolan stood at the cottage door with a life jacket in each hand.

"The light's good for another hour," he said. "My mother says you haven't touched a camera since Saturday."

"I've touched four."

"You haven't taken a picture."

He was right, and I disliked that.

Bea had driven back to Grand Rapids that morning to move my files out of the studio.

She was also going to find a lawyer who would answer a Monday phone call.

I had spent the day on the cottage floor with her list of charges.

I had not wanted to look at my own camera.

"Come out on the water," Nolan said. "Point it at something that isn't them."

We took the green canoe out past the end of the dock, where the lake went from brown to dark blue.

He paddled from the back and I sat in front with the camera in my lap.

For ten minutes neither of us said a word, and it was the first quiet I'd had in three days.

"Turn around," I said.

"Why?"

"I want you in the light."

He stopped the paddle and let the canoe drift.

The sun was low behind him and gold on the left side of his face.

I raised the camera.

"Look past me," I said. "At the far shore."

He looked.

I took six frames.

The shutter sounded clean in all that open air, and it was the best sound I had heard since Saturday.

"You're still tilting your chin," I said. "Here."

I leaned back over the thwart and put two fingers on his jaw and turned his face a quarter-inch toward the light.

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