When Fritz came
Fritz pulled in Friday night at nine-thirty, still smelling like the milk barn. He had driven straight from the evening milking. He hugged Bridget first, before he even got his bag out of the truck.
Then he walked down to the beach where Eldon was standing at the waterline in the dark, smoking a cigarette he would not have let his daughter see.
I watched them from the boardwalk. I could not hear what they said. Fritz talked for a while with his hands in his pockets, and Eldon mostly looked at the sand.
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Then Eldon said something, and Fritz nodded, and put his hand on Eldon’s shoulder for just a second. Then they both stood there looking at the water for a long time without talking.
When Fritz came back up, I asked him what he’d said.
“I told him if he ever put his hands on anything of hers again, he and I were going to have a different kind of conversation,” Fritz said. “And then I asked him how he was doing. And he told me.”
“What did he say?”
“That’s his business,” Fritz said. “But he’s not doing good, Elise. He’s not doing good at all.”
The year after
We went home on Sunday. Life went on the way it does.
Bridget took that waterproof camera everywhere. She shot the county fair in Greenwood, the Friday night football games, the hay bales in the fields along Highway 72. She shot the dairy cows coming in to the barn at sunrise.
She entered three photographs in the youth division at the county fair that fall. One of them took first place: a picture of her grandmother’s hands, shelling butter beans into a dishpan on the back porch.
Mama has that picture framed on her wall. She tells everybody who comes over that her granddaughter is a photographer. She says it like it is a job title.
Eldon and Colleen came for Thanksgiving. Eldon was polite with Bridget and Bridget was polite with him. Neither of them ever brought up the beach.
At Christmas, Eldon handed Bridget a card with a fifty-dollar gift card to the camera store in Columbia. She thanked him. She used it to buy a memory card and a cleaning kit.
And in April, Katie got engaged.