The Girl Who Kept Shooting

The sun was sitting low over Edisto Beach, turning the whole Atlantic the color of honey, when my daughter lifted her camera and took one picture of her uncle Eldon.

Just one. I heard the little click from ten feet away. Bridget was fifteen, all curly red hair and elbows, standing at the waterline in her mint T-shirt with the foam running over her feet.

Eldon was walking the edge of the surf in his navy polo, the way he did every evening of every beach week. He had his hands in his pockets and his head down, watching the shells.

He heard the click too. I watched his shoulders go up.

He turned around and crossed that wet sand in four long steps. He did not say a word. He reached out, took the camera right out of Bridget’s hands, and the strap slid off her wrist like it was nothing.

Then he threw it. Sidearm, low and hard, the way a man skips a rock on a farm pond. It hit the face of a breaking wave and disappeared.

The wave broke right on top of it. It tumbled in the white water, and then the wave ran up the sand and dropped it in the foam a few feet from Bridget, black and shining, full of salt water and sand. It was dead before it stopped rolling.

“Ask first,” Eldon said. His voice was flat and quiet, almost polite. Then he turned around and walked up the beach toward the boardwalk without looking back once.

I am Elise Pruitt. I was forty-two that summer. I clean teeth for a living at a dental office in Greenwood, South Carolina, and I am not a woman who makes scenes. I stood there with my mouth open.

Bridget did not cry. That is the part I still think about. She stood at the waterline in the gold light and looked down at her camera lying in the foam, with the water running in and out around her ankles.

“Mom,” she said, very quietly. “Don’t.”

I had not even moved yet. But she knew me. She knew I was about to go up that boardwalk after him, and she knew what that would do to the week.

What that camera was

You have to understand what it cost her, because it was not the money exactly. It was the two summers.

That camera was a used Canon Rebel with the kit lens, three hundred and fifty dollars from a man in Abbeville who sold it on Facebook Marketplace. Bridget had saved for it since she was thirteen.

She babysat the Hendersons’ twins every Tuesday and Thursday. She cleaned out stalls at the riding barn on Saturdays for eight dollars an hour. She kept the cash in a coffee can with a strip of masking tape on the lid.

When she finally had enough, her daddy drove her to Abbeville to meet the man in the parking lot of the Hardee’s. She counted out the bills on the hood of the truck. I have a picture of that on my phone.

She had owned it for eleven days. She had taken about four hundred pictures. Most of them were of dogs, clouds, her grandmother’s hands, and the cows at the dairy where her daddy works.

She had brought it to the beach because she wanted to shoot the ocean. She had never seen the ocean with a real camera in her hands, and she had been talking about it for a month.