To Be Her Girl by Emily Cradduck

Author:Emily Cradduck [Cradduck, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-30T06:00:00+00:00

We had a late lunch delivered with no intention of leaving the apartment until we had to. I hadn’t a care what was going on outside that door. I hadn’t even checked my phone since I texted Signey and Grant around two in the morning.

We ate Chinese food on the floor of her living room while discussing the more sensible subject of animals. Grateful Dead was spinning on the record player, and I told her about Cora and Rhett’s dog, which led to my grandma’s bird, and eventually the history of every pet I ever had. She told me she was allergic to cats, as I had suspected, but grew up with a dog named Archie, which was the name of my first cat.

We skipped dinner but had another bowl of ice cream. It was like we were running on pure stardust. Our energy was unstoppable.

After finishing the carton of Neapolitan, she showed me her office that housed her photography equipment. There was a Christmas stocking on the wall above her desk, which made me laugh. It had fallen from a box while she was unpacking, so she hung it up rather than putting it away. It was almost Christmas, she figured, though it was only August. Her every quirk made me smile.

High on a shelf sat her mom’s old camera, unused for years, and the photograph of the waves that first introduced us hung on the wall.

I sat on the floor, flipping through an album of her mom’s work. There were several photographs of Iris and several of the beach. I told her when she was ready to go back, I’d drive. She simply smiled and shuffled through a folder of her own photographs.

I found a picture of her dad leaning against his motorcycle. He was short with golden blond hair and a perfectly chiseled jawline. Iris had his little button nose and the same round eyes. And by the stance of his body and the smirk on his face, I could tell she had inherited his confidence too. She told me the picture had been taken the day before the accident, and I felt my heart ache for her misfortunes again. I wanted to go back to that day when I rear-ended her stepdad and thank him.

She spun around in her chair and set the folder on her desk. She moved the computer mouse, waking up her iMac.

I shut the album and stood, peeking over her shoulder. “You take a lot of the audience,” I said.

She was searching through a digital folder of old concert shots. “They’re just as much a part of the experience,” she said.

I turned around to put the album I had been holding on the bookcase behind us.

“Here it is,” she said.

I turned to find a picture of me on her computer. It was from a concert two years before we met. She came across it by chance a few days after the art show in June.

“I couldn’t stop crying after I found it,” she said quietly, as if she hadn’t wanted me to hear.

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