The Girl Who Kept Shooting

The photographer

Katie was marrying a boy named Andrew Hollings, a lineman for the electric co-op. He was a good, quiet, broad-shouldered young man who said ma’am and sir and meant it.

They set the date for the second Saturday in June. They wanted it out at Eldon’s daddy’s old homeplace, outside Ninety Six, under the pecan trees where Katie had played as a little girl.

Colleen called me in May, and she was crying.

“The photographer wants twenty-eight hundred dollars,” she said. “That’s the cheapest one in Greenwood. And Eldon’s hours just got cut again at the distribution center. We can’t do it, Elise. We can’t.”

“What about a friend with a good phone?”

“That’s what Eldon said. Katie’s trying to be brave about it. But she wanted real pictures. She’s been looking at wedding pictures on her phone since she was twelve.”

I hung up and sat on the porch for a while. Then I went and found Bridget out in the yard, shooting the light coming through the dogwood.

I did not ask her anything. I just told her what Colleen had told me.

Bridget lowered the camera. She looked at me for a long time.

“Katie should ask me herself,” she said. “If she wants me.”

Katie’s call

Katie called the next night. I was sitting on the front steps and Bridget was out in the yard, and I heard her side of it through the open window of the truck, where she had gone to sit for privacy.

“Yes,” she said. Then, “No, I mean it.” Then, “You don’t have to pay me anything. I want to.”

Then she listened for a while. “I know,” she said. “I know he will. That’s okay.”

She came out of the truck and sat down on the steps next to me. Her eyes were wet.

“She said she’d pay me two hundred dollars,” Bridget said. “I told her no. She said her daddy didn’t know she was calling. She said he might not like it.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d do it anyway.” She looked out at the yard. “I said it’s her wedding, not his.”

I put my arm around her. She was sixteen by then, taller than me, and she let me.

Eldon found out a week later. Colleen told me he did not say a word about it. He just went out to the shed and did not come in for supper.