Riveted

The box said KITCHEN in Ralph's blocky handwriting, which somehow made it heavier, or that was what Janna told herself when she got it up onto her shoulder. It had been nine years since she'd helped clear out anybody's place, and Ralph's aunt had kept a lot of stuff. All of it held views about gravity.

"Where you want this?" she called down the hall.

"Truck," Ralph said from somewhere near the bathroom. "Careful, the door frame sticks out. Took a chunk of drywall already."

"I'm a professional," she said, even though nobody paid her to carry boxes. She welded. Seven years at the shop with Ralph and his crew, and she'd gotten pretty good at pretending the welding was the dangerous part and everything else was easy. She ducked through the doorway, squeezed past a stack of boxes that reached her chin, and saw a man standing in the front entry with a camera hanging off his neck.

Lance. Thirty-six years old now, still skinny, still had that haircut that looked like he'd cut it himself on a dare. He was holding a piece of paper like a court order.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself." She didn't put the box down. That felt important.

"Ralph's aunt was my great-aunt too. Different side. I'm here for the credenza. Chantal found it online, in the estate listing."

"You don't say." Janna shifted the box on her shoulder. She was thirty-four and she still remembered how it felt to be twenty-five and crying in a parking lot because some man wanted her to follow him to Chicago and she wouldn't go. Bitter wasn't the word. The word was more like a rivet she'd never drilled out.

A woman stepped out from behind Lance, from the hallway that led to the spare bedroom. Dark hair, glasses, a linen jacket that cost more than Janna's truck payment. She looked about thirty-two and she was looking at Janna the way Janna looked at a weld that needed checking. Slow. Thorough.

"You must be Janna," the woman said. "I'm Chantal."

"Credenza's in the back room," Janna said, not to Chantal. "The teak one. It's heavy, so I hope you brought help."

"We brought me," Lance said, and lifted the camera off his neck like he was showing her a badge.

Ralph came around the corner with a roll of tape in his hand and a look on his face that said he had no idea what kind of room he'd just walked into, which was typical of Ralph. "Oh, hey, the other nephew guy. Credenza's the teak thing, right? Yeah, it's a beast. Janna can deadlift you if you need a spot."

"I'm sure she can," Lance said, and raised the camera, and took a picture of her.

Just like that. No asking. The shutter clicked and Janna stood there with a box of kitchen junk on her shoulder and her sleeves shoved up past her elbows, and something in her stomach did a thing she refused to name.

"Excuse me?" she said.

"Documenting the estate," Lance said, all casual, like he was photographing a barn. "Chantal wants reference shots. Lighting in this place is kind of amazing."

"It's a half-empty apartment," Janna said. "There's a bare bulb."

"There's a window," Chantal said, quietly, like she was settling a bet. "West facing. Late afternoon. He's right, the light's good."

Janna put the box down finally, in the truck, on top of a mattress Ralph had wrestled out earlier. When she came back in, Lance was shooting the credenza, which was fair. Then he was shooting the hallway, which was fine. Then he was shooting her.

He shot her picking up a roll of packing paper. He shot her kneeling down to tape the bottom of a box. He shot her reaching up to pull a lamp cord, and she heard the shutter and her whole back went stiff, and then, and this was the part that really made her mad, she heard the shutter again, twice, because she'd held the reach a half second longer than she needed to.

"You're wasting film," she said.

"Digital," he said. "Doesn't work like that anymore."

"Well, you're wasting something."

Ralph appeared with two coffees from the place on the corner and handed one to Lance, because Ralph's solution to every social problem was caffeine. "You two know each other?" he asked, in the tone of a man who wanted the answer to be no.

"Long time ago," Janna said.

"We dated," Lance said. "Two years."

"Under two years," Janna said.

"Two years, three months," Lance said, and took a sip of coffee, and looked at her over the rim of the cup.

Ralph whistled, low, the way he did at the shop when a deadline went sideways, and then said he was gonna go measure the truck ramp, and left them to it. Chantal stayed. Chantal sat on the arm of a shrink-wrapped chair, crossed her legs, and watched them both like this was a show she had paid admission for.

The spare room still had the welding gear in it, Janna's own stuff, stored there while her own apartment got its floors redone. She went to move the tanks, because that was the next thing on Ralph's list, and the oxygen cylinder was the heavy one, forty pounds of steel that had no handles. You picked it up with your whole body or you didn't pick it up at all. You bent your knees, you gripped the collar, and you came up slow, and somewhere in the middle of coming up slow she realized her back was arching, on purpose, rolling one vertebra at a time, because Lance's lens was pointed at her and she knew exactly what that angle looked like.

Sweat had dried at her temple. She could feel it, a tight little line of salt. Her biceps were doing their thing under her skin, the good kind of ache, the kind she'd earned in a shop full of men who'd stopped making comments around year two.

The shutter clicked. Once. Twice. Three times.

She set the tank down by the door and turned around and Lance lowered the camera, and Chantal was smiling a small closed-mouth smile, and Janna's face was hot and her pulse was up and she hated every single part of how that felt, because the honest truth, the part she'd never say out loud, was that she liked it. Nine years later and he pointed a camera at her and she wanted to be looked at. That was the ugly fact of the afternoon.

"You got a problem," she said, "you could just say it."

"No problem," Lance said. "You're just good to photograph. You always were. You've got this way of moving, like the work matters."

"The work does matter."

"I know. That's what I said."

"Wasn't a compliment," Janna said. "It was an insult with good lighting."

Chantal laughed. Not a big laugh, just an exhale through the nose, but it was the first sound she'd made in ten minutes and it landed in the room with the heavy, jarring clatter of a tool falling on a concrete floor. "She's got you there," she said to Lance.

"Everyone's got me somewhere," Lance said, and raised the camera again, and this time Janna didn't tell him to stop, and they both noticed that she didn't, and the shutter clicked in the quiet like something being decided.

Ralph came back in wiping his hands on his jeans and said he was gonna make a run for more boxes. "Store on Fifth's got 'em cheap if you buy a bundle. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen with traffic." He pointed at Janna with his car keys. "Don't let 'em talk you into doing the heavy stuff twice. I know you."

"I never do anything twice," she said.

"That's what worries me," he said, and he was gone, and the door clicked behind him, and then it was the three of them and the dust and the boxes and the west window doing its thing with the light.

Chantal uncrossed her legs and recrossed them the other way.

"So," she said. "This is going to sound weird."

"Everything today sounds weird," Janna said. "Go ahead."

"I do this. Curating, installations, that sort of thing. And I've been looking for a piece about labor. About bodies doing labor. Real bodies, not models." She gestured at the room with one hand, slow, like she was framing it. "You two clearing this place out. The truck. The wrap. The way you move. There's a whole piece in that."

"You want to photograph me moving boxes," Janna said.

"I want to document the process. Both of you. The whole afternoon, honestly. Call it what it is, call it anything you want. I'd shoot, he'd shoot, or I'd just watch him shoot." She looked at Lance. "We've talked about doing something collaborative."

"We have," Lance said.