The Backyard Promise

I came home early on a Thursday. That alone should have told me something was off. My Thursday meetings ran until eight, usually later, and I'd spent the last seven years letting them.

But Donna from accounting had taken over the vendor call, and I'd sat there realizing I hadn't done a single useful thing all day, so I just left. Twenty-eight minutes home on the parkway if traffic was kind. It was kind.

I pulled into the driveway at 6:40 and Abe's car was already there. That was normal. He kept odd hours with the photography, chasing light in the mornings and editing at all hours. What wasn't normal was where he was. Not in the office with the door shut. Out back, on the patio, laptop open on the little table, a beer half gone beside him.

I sat in the car for a minute with the engine off. Through the side gate I could see him hunched over the screen, the way he sits when he's really into a shot, shoulders curled, one hand on the trackpad. He had his glasses on, the ones he swears make him look old. He's thirty-eight. He does not look old in them. He looks like the guy who talked me into a second drink at that hotel bar in Cleveland nine years ago, back when I was twenty-five and he was twenty-nine, and we were both pretending the conference we'd met at mattered.

I should have gone in the front door. That was the plan, drop my bag, change out of the work clothes, come out and say something normal like hi, you're home. Instead I stood in the driveway in my sensible heels and my gray blazer and felt like a guest at my own house.

The lawn needed mowing. It always needed mowing by August. The fence on the east side still leaned the way it had when we bought the place, and the swing set the previous owners left was rusting in the corner like a monument to kids we never had and never quite decided against. Abe kept saying he'd tear it down. He kept not tearing it down.

He used to chase me around that yard. I mean that literally. First summer we owned the place, before the routines got their teeth in, he'd come out with the hose and I'd end up soaked and screaming and laughing so hard my sides hurt. We'd lie in the grass after, half drunk on cheap wine, pointing at clouds. Now he points at a screen and I point at a spreadsheet and the clouds can fend for themselves.

I went in through the gate. The hinge squealed like it always does and he didn't look up.

"Hey," I said. "You're easy to sneak up on today."

"Hey, babe." He glanced up, did the half smile, went back to the screen. "Didn't hear you. You're home early."

"Donna took my call. I fled the scene." I set my bag on the patio chair and stood there like an idiot, not sure what I'd come out here to do. The light was doing that late summer thing, going gold and long, hitting the fence posts sideways. Even I could tell it was good light, and I can't tell light from a hole in the wall.

Abe could. He was squinting past the laptop at the fence like it was something worth photographing. Which, to him, it probably was.

"The light's dumb good right now," he said, mostly to himself.

"What's on the screen?"

"Client edits. The Hendersons' kitchen. Somebody put a fern in the corner of every frame." He rubbed his eyes under the glasses. "It's whatever. I'll finish it tonight."

I looked at the fern shots. I looked at the yard. I looked at my husband, who I loved, who I had somehow stopped knowing what to say to in the last year or so, and I heard myself ask something before I'd decided to ask it.

"Take some pictures of me."

He looked up. Actually looked up, glasses and all.

"What, now?"

"Now. The light's dumb good, right? You just said so."

"Leanne." He laughed a little, but not at me, more at the surprise. "You hate getting your picture taken. You made me delete the ones from your work thing."

"That was the work thing. Everybody looked terrible at the work thing, that was the point of it." I pulled my blazer off the chair and hung it over the fence rail. My heart was up and I couldn't have told you why. "You used to take pictures of me all the time. Back when. You had a whole folder."

"Leaning Tree Park folder," he said. "Yeah. I remember."

We used to go there on Sunday mornings, before he went legit with the business, when he was still shooting anything that held still. He'd point the camera at me and tell me to walk, just walk, and act like the camera wasn't there. I'd hated it then too, and I'd loved it then too, and I hadn't thought about it in probably five years.

"So do it again," I said. "Here. In the yard. While the light lasts."

He closed the laptop halfway, which with Abe is a big commitment. "Okay. Yeah. Okay." He got up and went into the office, and I heard him digging in the closet where the real camera bag lives, the one with the good lenses. I took my heels off and stood in the grass in my stockings, which felt ridiculous and also felt like something.

He came back out with the camera and the fifty millimeter, no flash, and he was different already. I saw it happen. He looked through the viewfinder and he was working, and when Abe is working he pays attention with his whole face.

"Stand by the swing set," he said. "No, other side. Face me, but look off past my shoulder. Past it, not at it."

I looked off past his shoulder.

"Okay, don't move." Shutter clicks, a bunch of them. "Chin down a hair. There. God, the light on you right now."

"You have to say that. I'm married to you."

"I don't have to say anything, I have to edit the Hendersons' fern." Click, click. "Turn toward me more. Untuck your blouse a little, it photographs stiff tucked."

I untucked it. The air hit my stomach through the shirt and I felt stupid and thirty-four and weirdly okay about it.

"Now walk," he said. "Like the park. Just walk and don't perform."

So I walked across the patchy lawn in my stockings, past the rusted swing set, and something cracked open a little on the way. Because he was following me with the camera and he was following me with his eyes, both, and I could tell the difference. He wasn't shooting a yard. He was shooting me.

"Stop," he said, quiet. "Right there. Look at me now. Just me, not the lens."

I looked at him. Click.

"Huh," he said.

"Huh what?"

"Nothing. Keep looking." Click, click. "I forgot. I actually forgot."

"Forgot what?"

"How you look when you're not braced for anything." He lowered the camera. The sun was going down behind the fence and the whole yard went that orange color, and he stood there holding the camera against his chest like someone who'd been handed something back that he'd written off.

I stood in the grass with my blouse untucked and my stockings wrecked at the heels, and I felt seen for the first time in I couldn't say how long. Months, at least. Maybe longer. It was embarrassing how good it felt, and I didn't care.

"Abe."

"Yeah."

"Keep taking pictures. As long as the light lasts."

He raised the camera. "The light's going to quit in twenty minutes."

"Then you better keep up."

He kept up. He had me sit on the swing, which groaned but held. He had me take my hair down, and I did, and it fell past my shoulders the way it did when we met. He got low and shot up at me against the sky and I heard him breathe out through his nose, the way he does when a frame is right.

"The swing set," I said. "You never tore it down."

"No," he said, click, click. "Turns out I was waiting for a reason to keep it."

The sun hit the fence line and the gold went red at the edges, and I got off the swing and walked toward him and the camera and whatever came next.

I stopped in front of him, close enough that the lens almost touched me.

"Take the blouse off," he said. Then, quick, "Sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that. If you don't want to..."

"I want to." I said it before I could think better of it, and then I was glad I'd said it, because he wasn't asking for a favor. He was asking because he wanted to see. There's a difference and I felt it in my legs.

I unbuttoned it slow. Not slow like a performance, slow like my fingers weren't totally steady. Six buttons, seven. I shrugged it off my shoulders and let it drop on the grass next to my blazer, and I stood there in my bra and my wrecked stockings in my own backyard where the neighbor could theoretically trim his hedge.

"Jesus, Leanne."

"Is that a review or a prayer?"

"Both. Turn around. Back to the fence."

I turned and put my shoulders against the