My cozy bedroom, furnished in collegiate style with bricks and boards bookcases and a desk and chair scavenged from yard sales, suited me just fine. I kept a padded rocking chair in front of the hearth. Even though the fireplace was bricked over, it was a comfy place to read a novel. Of course, I usually spent my late evenings at the sewing machine, but I could always dream. But tonight, at least my early evening would be spent in stimulating company.
I slipped on a pale blue cotton blouse and a swingy skirt that fell just above the knee, paired with my favorite strappy sandals. Not too dressy, but ready for dancing if that was what McCarthy had in mind. I shook out the bobby pins holding back my flyaway brown hair, and studied the possibilities in the mirror. No matter how much I brushed and coaxed, my unruly mop was not so much smooth and shiny as rough and ready. I remember standing in the girls’ bathroom with my high school buddies, the three of us brushing and primping before fourth period math class. Suzanne had poked me and said, “It doesn’t matter if you brush your hair or not, it looks the same either way.” I’d sulked over that statement for weeks afterward, but now at the wise old age of twenty-nine I had to admit she’d been right. No sense wasting time over it! I swept up the sides into two carved bamboo combs and let the back fall free. I smiled at my reflection: wide brown eyes, teeth a titch crooked through lack of middle school braces, cheeks soft and rounded. Standing tall at five foot three, I was repeatedly cast as the young ingénue in high school drama productions. “You’ve got that fresh-faced look we want,” was the mantra. Fair enough. I scooped up a light cotton sweater and headed down the stairs to meet McCarthy.
He was waiting for me on the front porch. Any other man would be sitting on the porch swing, or leaning on the rail checking messages on his phone. Not McCarthy! He lay on his stomach on the floorboards, his camera lens trained on some point off the corner of the porch. He didn’t notice me in the doorway. He scootched along on his belly, heedless of his white shirt, murmuring, “Come on now, you’ve got this.” He chuckled softly, his camera clicking away.
The familiar sight of his comfortably worn jeans, customary white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and dark blond ponytail tied back with a thick rubber band made me smile. I hadn’t admitted to myself how much I’d missed him while he was away these past three weeks.
Sean McCarthy took pictures for the local newspaper, the Laurel Springs Daily Chronicle. I’d met him a month earlier, when he was covering a Civil War reenactment for which I was sewing uniforms. The heady mix of romantic historical reenacting and violent death at the encampment threw us together into an intense relationship. I’d welcomed McCarthy’s recent absence as a chance to sort out my feelings for him. Now, faced with the man himself, I knew I had come to no conclusion. Would it be so bad if I just went along for the ride?
I must have made some noise coming out the door, for McCarthy rolled onto his left shoulder and peered up at me. His camera caught a quick image of my face, and then he scrambled to his feet. “Spidey’s got a wasp in his web. It’s struggling like crazy, but it hasn’t got a chance. Look, you can see him ejecting the poison.” He fiddled with the buttons on the back of his camera and held it out to me. Indeed, his magnificent close-up shots revealed a showy black-and-yellow spider locked in a death dance with a half-wrapped wasp. A rapid-fire series of photos caught a strand of the web separating from the whole, falling away from the struggle. As always, I marveled at the magical world that McCarthy’s lens unveiled.
“Are you rooting for the spider, you bloodthirsty voyeur?”
He grinned, and brushed some dust off his shirt. “This is a story of survival, and I’m on the spider’s side all the way. I was ambushed by wasps once, when I was eight. True, I had just trampled on their nest, but they shouldn’t have taken that so personally. It left me scarred for life.”
I laughed and gave him a quick hug. “It’s good to see you.”
With the awkwardness averted, we hopped in his car and drove across town to the Commons to find a place to eat. As usual, the street parking was full, but McCarthy managed to find a place to park in a sketchy-looking alley. I watched my step until we reached the brick pavement of the Commons.
McCarthy chatted about his trip to the Catskills to photograph a local Boy Scout troop’s high adventure white-water rafting excursion. “They hope to get a feature in Boys’ Life magazine. It’s hardly the Pulitzer, but they’re pretty pumped.” He took my hand and swung our arms between us as we walked. “I hear you’re working on the historical makeover of the old Compton house. Do you suppose those TV folks will let me hang around and take some photos?”
I gently disengaged my hand. “Would it stop you if they said no?”
His eyes crinkled at the edges when he smiled at me. “There is that.”
We settled on Fortni’s Pizzeria, a cozy storefront with round tables covered in red-checkered tablecloths and decorated with candles planted in wine bottles dripping with multicolored wax. We ordered spinach and mushroom pizza, paired with a pitcher of sangria garnished with peaches.
“So, what’s it like to work on a reality TV show set?” McCarthy pulled out his notebook, but only to doodle on a blank page while we talked.
“It’s kind of cool, and kind of creepy at the same time. You never know when someone’s going to start filming you and asking a bunch of questions about what you’re doing. Everyone’s hyped up about the money.”
“Money?”
“What, you don’t know how this whole thing works?”
He laughed. “I’ve been in the wilds of upstate New York, camping on the banks of a raging river. I’m a bit out of touch.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. Priscilla’s house was chosen by My House in History to compete with maybe a dozen other historic houses. They’re all challenged to restore the houses to the time period in which they were built, which in this case was 1770. Film crews are documenting the work along the way, and when it’s all done the TV viewers get to vote on their favorite historic house. The winner gets a million dollars and the chance to be on the sequel show, My Life in History. In this one they have to live in their historical time period, with film crews documenting their daily activities.”
I stared at McCarthy’s paper, watching in fascination as he doodled a series of complex snowflakes radiating out from a central point. He caught me looking, and started drawing a line of dollar signs. “A million dollars is a lot of money.”
“Sure. It might be worth all the upheaval at Compton Hall. But there’s always the chance that someone else will win, and Priscilla will be left with an eighteenth-century house with no running water or electricity.”
“Poor old lady. It’s hard to imagine her being motivated by a million dollars. She’s always seemed so unsophisticated.”
“She’s a darling.” I moved the salt and pepper shakers out of the way so the waitress could set down our pizza. “Do you know her?”
McCarthy snagged a piece of pizza and picked off a big slice of mushroom to pop into his mouth. “I photographed her last year during the Laurel Springs House Tour. It was the first time she’d put Compton Hall on the tour in thirty years, or so the organizers told me. They were stoked to offer tours of a house on the National Register of Historic Places. Priscilla suffered the onslaught of visitors with quiet dignity.”
“How did she deal with an obnoxious photographer pestering her for yet another close up?”
He grinned. “I was on my best behavior, I’ll have you know. She reminded me of my grandmother, who died when I was eleven years old. Sweet lady.”
I wasn’t sure if the sweet lady was Priscilla or his grandmother, but either way, I enjoyed the tender tone in McCarthy’s voice. It vanished in an instant.
“So, can you get me in for a story on the reality show? The Daily Chronicle would love to run a feature, and I imagine