The View from the Balcony

You'd think at your own family reunion somebody would notice when you arrive. Not in my family! I walked into the lodge at the Lakeshore Resort on a Friday afternoon in late August, twenty-eight years old, a potted peace lily in each hand because apparently I was still the one who brought the flowers, and not one single person looked up from the snack table.

"Hi, hello, it's me, Shawna, I drove four hours!" I said to my aunt Darlene, who was arguing with my uncle Gino about whether the pontoon boat counted as his or the timeshare's.

"Oh, hi sweetheart, those go over by the fireplace," she said, and turned right back to Gino. And that was that. Four hours of driving, two hours of arranging actual flowers because grocery store carnations were insulting, and I got a furniture instruction.

Let me back up. I'm Shawna, I'm twenty-eight, I own half of a flower shop in a town nobody's heard of, and I've got the bad luck to be the quiet one in a family of bullhorns. My mom is one of seven kids. Seven! Every reunion is like being dropped into a baseball stadium where everybody already knows the game except you. My cousin Miranda brought a friend this year, some photographer I'd never met, and even HE got a louder welcome than me. People asked him about his camera for twenty minutes.

So I did what I always do. I found a job. Jobs are how I survive these things. I put the lilies by the fireplace, then I went out to the big wooden deck that hangs over the lake and I started decorating the railings with the extra greenery, wrapping little bunches around the posts, and honestly it looked so good. Somebody would notice eventually. Somebody always says something about the flowers by Sunday.

It was while I was wrestling a garland around the last post that I felt it. That feeling like somebody's looking at you, you know the one? The hair on your arms goes up and you don't know why. I looked up and across the deck, past the cooler full of beer and two of my uncles arguing about fishing, there was a man leaning against the far railing with a camera hanging off his shoulder.

He wasn't taking pictures of the lake. He was looking at me. Not glancing, not doing that slide-your-eyes-away thing men do when they get caught. Just looking, like I was the only thing on the deck worth focusing on. He had dark curly hair pushed back and a beard that was trying very hard and a beer in his hand that he'd clearly forgotten about. And when I looked back at him, instead of pretending he'd been staring at the water the whole time, he did the wildest thing. He nodded. Like, hello, I see you, you see me, isn't that something?

I don't know what my face did. Probably nothing, because my face has never worked right under pressure. But my whole chest did something weird, like it was a struck tuning fork. When does anyone actually SEE me at these things? Never! I could stand on this deck in a gorilla suit and my family would ask me to move so they could see the lake!

I went back to my garland. My hands were being weird about it too, all thumbs. And I could still feel him watching, which should have been creepy but wasn't, it was more like being warm on one side. I risked another glance and he'd lifted the camera, not pointed at me, just resting it on his chest, and he tilted his head like he was asking a question. Are you okay over there? Are you having as strange a Friday as I am?

"Who's the guy?" I asked my cousin Shelby, who came out onto the deck carrying a plate of deviled eggs like they were newborn twins.

"Hm? Oh, that's Rafael, Miranda's friend. Photographer. He's been wandering around all day taking pictures of stuff. Trees, the dock, your flowers, probably." She shifted the eggs. "You doing the flowers? They look really nice, by the way."

Shelby said they looked nice! Twenty years of family gatherings and Shelby finally noticed. See, this is why I keep doing the flowers.

"Does Miranda know he's over here staring at me?" I asked, trying to make it a joke, and Shelby laughed and said oh, Rafael's not staring, he just looks at everything like that, he's kind of intense, it wears off. But it wasn't wearing off. He was still over there, and every time I looked up, our eyes met, and every time it was like a tiny electric fence. I kept decorating. I wrapped the same post four times. If anyone had been watching ME they'd have seen a woman braid a railing into a rope cocoon.

I have never said this out loud to anybody, but this is my story so I will say it: I like being looked at. I just never get it, so I forgot I liked it. At the shop I'm behind the counter. At home I'm on my couch. At reunions I'm the flower girl. And there was this stranger across a deck looking at me like I was the sunset, and my skin remembered a thing my brain had filed away years ago. It felt dangerous and lovely at the same time, like the first hour of a thunderstorm.

Dinner was the usual chaos, forty people and a folding table situation that defies physics. I ended up across from Rafael, two seats down, close enough to hear him when he talked but not supposed to be talking to him, because Miranda was on his other side running commentary on the whole family for his benefit. "That's Uncle Gino, don't get him started on the boat. That's Aunt Darlene, she made the potato salad, take some before Shelby's kids find it."

I watched him work the table. He was good at it, quiet-good, asking questions and letting people fill the air, and every so often his eyes would come around the table to me and rest there a half second longer than they needed to. I counted three of those half seconds. I was counting them! That's how starved I am, I was counting half seconds like baseball cards.

After dinner there was music and somebody's Bluetooth speaker and my cousins' kids running wild, and I slipped out to the deck with a glass of wine because the noise gets to me around nine. The lake was doing that thing where it holds the last light and won't let go. And maybe two minutes later the door behind me opened and it was him, camera in hand, and he stopped like he'd walked into a room he wasn't sure he was allowed in.

"Sorry," he said. "I was going to shoot the lake. I can come back."

"It's a big deck," I said, which is the most brilliant thing I've ever said to a man, apparently, because he smiled and came out anyway and leaned on the rail a polite ten feet away.

"You're the one with the flowers," he said. "They're the best thing here. I took about forty pictures of them before dinner."

"Of the flowers," I said.

"Mostly." He said it easy, no wink, no smirk, just the truth sitting there in the open. And God, the water was dark and the deck lights were low and nobody, not one of my forty loud relatives, had come looking for me out here.

"Shawna," I offered, and he said Rafael, and we shook hands even though we'd been at the same dinner table, which was somehow the funniest thing all day. I want to tell you I played it cool. I did not play it cool. I asked him if he was really a photographer or just a guy with a camera, and he laughed and started showing me the day's shots, and there they were, my garlands and my lilies and one, just one, of a woman with a wine glass at a rail, taken from far enough away that you couldn't see her face. But I knew her shoulders anywhere.

We stood there looking at the lake and the pictures and the last of the light, and then he said something that stuck to me like a burr. "You know what's funny about this shot? You're the only thing in focus. The rail's soft, the water's soft, and there you are, sharp as anything." And I said, "That's because I was standing still," and he shook his head and said, "No, it's because you weren't performing. You were just there. That's the shot everybody wants and almost nobody gives you." I drank my wine so I'd have something to do with my mouth. Because what do you say to that? Thank you for seeing me, stranger, I've been starving for it since roughly 2019? No. You say "interesting," like a person at a gallery.

Then Miranda's voice came out the door, loud enough to scare the ducks, calling him to come look at Uncle Gino's boat pictures, and he went, and I stood there alone feeling like I was a struck match. Here's where I have to say the plain thing, because this is the part of the story the whole story is about: what happened that weekend, between me and Rafael, was watching. Being watched, watching back. I'd never done anything like it before in my life. I'd thought about it, in the dark, the way you think about things you assume aren't for you. And here was a man with a camera who looked at everything like it mattered, and something in me went, oh, maybe it IS for you.

So. The buffet table. That was Saturday lunch, and I want to walk you through it because it's where the whole thing actually started, even though it looked like nothing. The lodge does this sad steam-tray lunch situation, chicken in a sauce that claims to be lemon, and I was stacking a plate I wasn't even hungry for, just to have a job. And he was there next to me with the camera down at his side, which I noticed because I'd started noticing everything about him, the dark curls pushed back, the beard, the way he held a beer like it was an accessory.

"You put the garlands where the light comes through them," he said. Not hello. Just that.

I looked at him. "Excuse me?"

"Last night, on the deck. The greenery on the railings. You hung it where the evening sun comes through it from the west, so it backlights. Was that on purpose?"

And it was on purpose! I do it at the shop all the time, I put the eucalyptus in the window for exactly that reason, and nobody had ever once noticed, not my mother, not Shelby, not twenty years of family. I laughed, this ridiculous bark of a laugh that came out of me like a sneeze. "Yes! Yes, it was on purpose. Nobody's ever noticed that."

"Well, now somebody has!" He picked up a plate like he was going to eat and then just held it. "Same with your lilies this morning. You had them facing east for the early light, and by noon they'd be wasted. You're always arranging for where the light's going to be, not where it is."

"I arrange for the shadow too," I said, and my face went hot, because I hadn't meant to say it out loud, and it sounded like flirting, because it WAS flirting, and I hadn't flirted with a living man since I was twenty-three and Tony from the wholesale place broke my heart over a shared delivery van.

"Shadow's half the picture," he said, completely serious. "Most people shoot the light. The good stuff lives in the dark part of the frame." Then Miranda yelled his name from across the lawn and he gave me this little nod, like a thank you, and went off, and I stood there holding a plate of lemon chicken I did not eat one bite of.

That night was the balcony. This is the part you're here for, I know, I know how these stories get read. My cabin was number nine, second row up from the water, and it had this little wooden balcony with two chairs and a view over the common area down to the deck and the lake. Around ten I gave up on the bonfire noise and went up with the last of my wine, and I stepped out, and the air was that late-August warm that feels like a hand on your shoulder. And across the way, maybe sixty feet, cabin twelve's balcony light was on, and Rafael was standing at his rail with the camera hanging off his shoulder