Page 58 of This Love
Her sense of accomplishment was written all over her face. “I’m back on the road! Six weeks until I can drive on my own!”
When we walked inside the restaurant, she loved the place immediately. “It’s like in Casablanca! We’re in the movie.”
I had to agree with her here. In the corner, a man played an upright piano. The music heightened the charming, old-fashioned feel of the place with its nestled tables and antique decor.
We sat near the music, and she asked the man at the piano to play “As Time Goes By.” He gave her a half-smile. No doubt he was asked to play that song many times every night. I dropped some cash in this tip jar, and we settled at our table, close together, tucked against a wall draped with red velvet.
We talked about the menu, and she settled on their lasagna so we could compare it to our own. I chose some things I thought she might like to try, and we talked easily about the photos she’d been taking with Vinnie, my job, and the meals we would likely make next week.
Our lives were very small. Without the breadth and depth of her history, we could only speak of things that had happened in the last month. Just like the previous time she’d lost her memory, Ava had little interest in her forgotten past. She wanted to move forward, only focusing on the elements of her knowledge that she needed to help her with her present.
I ordered Baked Alaska for our dessert, and she clapped like a girl when the server lit the top on fire.
“I can’t believe it!” she said. “I’ve never had a dessert that caught on fire before!”
We had, more than once, but there was no need to tell her that. I smiled at her delight and dipped my spoon inside the ice cream to feed her a bite out of habit.
Her excitement about the new experience was high enough that she did not question me feeding her but leaned forward to accept it. I watched her swallow the bite, her eyes on me. Her comfort with me was growing.
“It’s really good,” she said. “It makes me feel funny inside.”
I knew the dessert wasn’t what was making her feel strange, but I simply nodded. I took a bite myself from the same spoon. She noticed, and her eyebrows lifted. But when I offered another bite to her on the same spoon again, she still took it.
This simple intimacy opened the door to get her closer to me. I pulled some notes from my adolescent playbook, turning on a scary movie after dinner so she would clutch my arm. I smiled when she grabbed hold of me but did not let go even when the frightening part had passed.
This was real progress.
Chapter 22
Ava
Tucker was good. Life with him was easy again.
My photography, however, was slow going.
One Friday, Vinnie and I sat at the don’t-drink-coffee table and reviewed prints of photos I’d taken of people at a park. Most of them were of him in various light situations. Full sun, partial shade, full shade. But we’d run into a family who came to Big Harry’s fairly often, and they were willing to let me practice on them.
“So, look at my nose in this one versus this one,” Vinnie said, putting two images of him side by side. “Can you see the difference?”
“Your nose is huge in that one,” I said. “Like it got squashed.”
“My nose is a thing of beauty,” Vinnie said with a laugh. “But if you flash it directly from the front, it will destroy my Calvin Klein aesthetic.”
Fortunately, I’d seen Calvin Klein ads in Flo’s magazine, so I knew what he was trying to say. I sometimes studied the photographs in those, looking at the poses, the shadows, the light sources. I took confusing ones to Vinnie to decipher, and he said, “Oh, that is just some bad Photoshop work.”
Photoshop was an entirely different beast. I was expected to get rid of blemishes and bruises. Vinnie had showed me how to use a digital pen to push in a roll of skin that spilled out over a waistband or to minimize a double chin.
That seemed like cheating to me, but Vinnie said people didn’t pay big bucks for professional photographers to look like their iPhone photos. They wanted to see the very best versions of themselves.
I preferred the flowers and the animals to people, but Vinnie said editorial work or photographic art was not an easy way to pay the bills.
And bills were important. Old Ava had worried a lot about covering rent and electric and making it on her own. It was all over her scrapbook. I was starting to understand it.
“Do you and Tucker have a date tonight?” Vinnie asked, gathering the photos.
“Yes, we’re making chicken spaghetti, which I had to ask about because I didn’t see how to make long skinny noodles out of chicken meat.”
Vinnie laughed. “Ava, Mija, you are a card.”
