Page 63 of Host for the Holidays
Laura doesn’t answer. She just takes Madi by the shoulders, looks at her like she’s about to cry, then pulls her in for a hug.
Five minutes later, I’m holding Madi’s camera bag, and Madi has taken at least thirty pictures. The tower started sparkling in the middle of it, and Madi and Laura just looked at each other for a second, their expressions identical in conveyingThis is happening.
I’ve just been watching with a little smile on my face as Madi works her magic. And then a thought hits me. I slip her phone from the pocket of the bag strapped across my chest and open the camera app. Trying my best to channel my non-existent inner photographer, I take a couple of shots of Madi as she does her thing with Laura and Luke, the Eiffel Tower sparkling behind.
I look at the result of my efforts. It’s hard to take a bad photo of Madi, and right now she’s clearly in her element. I slip her phone back into the bag, hoping what I did wasn’t weird. It wasn’t, right? Shoot. It might have been. But it’s too late to try to delete the pictures because Madi is finally finished.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’ve just never had such an amazing combination of subjects and location.”
“You’re saying sorry for offering us a mini photoshoot in front of the Eiffel Tower?” Laura says incredulously. “You two are up now!” She puts out her hand for Madi’s camera.
I wait for Madi to decline—that hard, glass door has to be coming sometime soon—but she doesn’t. And when we take our places with the sparkling Eiffel Tower behind us, she settles right into that spot under my arm, just like before, and then she looks up at me with a smile that might actually kill me.
TWENTY-SEVEN
RÉMY
We finishup just as the Eiffel Tower stops sparkling. Madi takes down Laura’s email address, and the two of them hug like old friends before we part ways.
Madi sticks her camera back in her bag hanging at my side, then helps me take it off so she can wear it again. “You know, if the whole teaching English gig doesn’t work out, I’d hire you on as my assistant in a New York minute.”
“It seems like you’ve got things pretty well under control on your own,” I say. “Was the business lunch you were supposed to have today for this type of job?” If so, Josh is in the doghouse more than ever. Madi was made for this.
She shakes her head as we start walking away from the Champs de Mars. “It was for product photography for the company.”
“Oh.” I’m trying to imagine Madi taking pictures of basketball shoes or cakes or something. I’m sure she’s good at it, but her charm seems wasted on products. “Do you enjoy that type of photography?”
Her nose scrunches. “I mean, the photos are aesthetically pleasing, which I can’t argue with, and little bottles of essential oils don’t check their watches when the shoot runs over. They also don’t show up late. Unless there are shipping delays.”
I chuckle. “But?”
“But . . .” Her mouth twists to the side. “The photos are just really . . . sterile. It’s hard to convey emotion with a bottle of tea tree oil.”
“Really?” I ask, feigning shock.
“Yes,Rémy. It is.”
“So conveying emotion is what you enjoy about photography?”
Her brow furrows under the bottom of the beanie she’s wearing. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s kind of why I started it in the first place.”
“What do you mean?” I know. I’m like a curious little kitten right now. Madi is my ball of yarn, and I need to untangle her.
She shrugs a shoulder. “My mom worked a lot growing up, and even when shewashome, she was stressed out doing the whole single mom thing. She tried really hard not to let us see how difficult things were for her, but both my brother and I knew. Anyway, there was this one night . . . I got out of bed to get a drink, and I saw her looking at this framed photo in the living room by herself. She was smiling at it, and I remember just staring at her from the hallway because it was so rare to see her look like that.”
I know what she means about watching her mom work so hard to keep life together. My mom’s worked hard for me, too, and Ireallywant to make her proud of me. Which is where the Bellevue position comes in. She’s so excited about the position, and to get it would feel like a way to show her all her hard work has paid off.
“What was the photo?” I ask.
“One of us all before my dad died. I was just a toddler, and my brother Jack was maybe four. We were at the lake, and we all looked so happy. And justlookingat it made my mom happy again. Anyway, I decided I wanted to try to capture more of those moments—and make them accessible in the future through photos.”
I gently clear away the thickness in my throat. I hadn’t realized Madi’s dad wasn’t around.
She looks over at me with a rueful smile as we wait to cross the street toward the metro. “I know. Silly kid dream.”
“It’s not silly at all. I grew up for a lot of my life without my dad around, and the motivation to make your mom happy is a powerful one.”
“Yeah . . .” she says, her head still turned toward me. Our eyes meet for a second, and it’s like that look Luke gave me a few minutes ago.Only you get me. Except this time, it’s accurate.
