“Come on, Suzanne,” Bessie said, her voice thick with impatience. “We’re losing the golden hour light.”
Golden hour. She actually said golden hour like she was a professional photographer instead of a woman in a too-tight dress.
I took the phone from Louis with hands that had started trembling.
I felt cold despite the eighty-degree Florida heat pressing down on my shoulders.
“Just press the big white button on the screen,” Louis instructed, as if I were some technologically illiterate senior citizen who’d never operated a camera. “And make sure you get the whole car in the shot. It’s a rental and we want people to see it.”
I stepped backward onto my lawn, putting distance between myself and the tableau they’d arranged.
I lifted the phone and looked at the screen.
There they were. My son. His wife. Her mother. All three of them beaming like they’d just won the lottery, arranged in front of a luxury vehicle that probably cost more to rent for a day than my monthly grocery budget.
And I was on the other side of the camera lens, documenting their happiness for strangers on social media.
I pressed the button.
Click.
“One more,” Louis called out, grinning even wider. “Turn the phone horizontal this time. Landscape mode.”
I rotated the phone ninety degrees with mechanical precision.
Click.
I lowered the device slowly and handed it back to him, my arm feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds.
Louis grabbed it eagerly and immediately started swiping through the images, checking quality and angles.
“Perfect. These are great, Mom. Thanks.”
He turned away from me and headed toward the driver’s side door.
Valerie climbed gracefully back into the front passenger seat.
Bessie hoisted herself into the back seat with considerable effort, her gold dress bunching around her knees.
And I stood there on my driveway in my blue silk dress and pearl earrings, clutch purse gripped in both hands, watching the three of them settle into the vehicle without me.
“Louis,” I said.
My voice came out as barely a whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again with more force.
“Louis.”
He paused with one hand on the driver’s door and looked back at me with an expression of mild irritation, like I was a stranger who’d asked him an inconvenient question.
“Yeah?”
I gestured helplessly toward the empty space in the back seat that I’d assumed was meant for me.
“Aren’t I coming with you?”
Louis laughed.
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