“I’m fine,” Maddie assured her with a smile. She’d been going over contact sheets all day from her last shoot and marking what she wanted to send to the retoucher. She had a keen eye and did just enough, but never too much. She didn’t want her subjects to look like they’d had a face-lift for the shoot, or to show them at their most unflattering either. She liked them to look real but beautiful, and she balanced it perfectly. Her subjects were always pleased with the final result. She was very undemanding of Penny about anything other than work. She never called her at home, except in a real emergency. Otherwise she waited until business hours to ask for what she needed. She did all her own personal errands. She never sent Penny to the dry cleaner, the drug store, or out to do menial tasks. She did those herself, and never felt too important to do so.
“What are you doing this weekend?” Penny asked her, handing Maddie a cup of tea that she hadn’t requested but appreciated. Maddie thanked her with a smile.
“I’m going to reorganize some closets. I promised myself I would. I’m running out of room, and I’ve got so much tucked away that I can’t fit anything else in. Time to do some weeding out and spring cleaning, and the weather is so lousy, I’m not going out tonight. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow and Sunday too.” Maddie loved puttering around the house. It was early May, but they’d had the wettest spring in New York history, and rain had been predicted for the weekend.
“Don’t do any heavy lifting,” Penny warned her. “I can help you with it on Monday.” Although during the week, they were both usually so buried in work, there was no time for closets. Maddie loved doing projects on the weekends. She was always busy with something.
“It’s just a lot of small junk in there. I’m not even sure what there is, which is why I want to go through it. I’m turning into a pack rat,” she said with an embarrassed grin, and Penny laughed.
“You don’t need to tell me that,” Penny answered, smiling. Maddie saved every shred of correspondence, no matter how far back, and almost every photograph she’d ever taken. They had extensive archives in storage.
“I’m going to try to throw some of it out this time,” Maddie said firmly. “I promise.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Penny said as she put her coat on and left with a wave a few minutes later. She walked through the studio and let herself out through the side door. She wondered if Maddie got lonely on the weekends. She had her work to keep her occupied, but Penny thought she should be seeing her grandchildren, and knew she hardly ever did. Penny’s own mother saw her grandchildren constantly. They were in and out of her house, and she was always cooking for them.
Maddie’s life was entirely different and Penny felt sorry for her, although Maddie would have been shocked to know that. She had long since learned how to keep engaged on her own, and in many ways, she enjoyed it. She didn’t expect to see her children and grandchildren more often than she did.
* * *
—
Maddie made scrambled eggs and a salad for dinner that night. She’d had half a turkey sandwich for lunch while she was working. She wasn’t a big eater and hated to cook for herself. Sometimes she just ate an apple or banana for lunch, and Penny scolded her. Maddie thought food was boring and cooking it even more so. She said it was the beauty of being alone. She didn’t have to prepare meals for anyone, not even herself if she didn’t want to. She’d rather skip a meal and spend the time doing something else.
After she ate, she got a ladder from the studio and dragged it carefully up the stairs to her bedroom closet. She liked doing chores for herself and had a sense of victory when she got the ladder to the third floor, with a firm grip on it. She set it up, climbed high enough to see the first level of shelves, pulled out a bunch of boxes and dropped them on the floor of her bedroom, and then she sat down next to them and started to go through them. As she suspected, a lot of what she found was junk, and she felt virtuous as she made a big pile of papers and old clothes to get rid of. She was going to have Penny send the clothes to Goodwill on Monday. It was several hours before she climbed to the next level on the ladder and pulled out the boxes on the second shelf. She hadn’t unearthed any treasures so far, just a box of letters from her kids when they were younger, which made her smile as she glanced through them. Some of them were letters from camp.
She put what was left neatly back on the shelves, looked at her watch, and wrestled with a decision. It was one in the morning. Should she tackle the highest shelf or go to bed and do it in the morning? She wasn’t tired, and often stayed up late either reading or working, which was another pleasure of living alone. She didn’t have to apologize to anyone for how late she stayed up or the noise she made, with the lights on at two or three A.M. And she wanted to get that one closet done. She had some things she wanted to add to the shelves, and there hadn’t been a spare inch to accommodate anything until she started weeding out. She was curious about what was on the top shelf. Whatever was there had been there for a long time and she’d forgotten what it was.
She decided to stay up and do it. She had the time, was in the mood, and she could sleep late on Saturday morning if it took her too long. She assumed it was probably more junk and she could get rid of it quickly anyway. She had a good-sized pile on her bedroom floor already, to donate or throw away. She pulled out several boxes and tossed them to the floor, climbed back down the ladder, and opened them. The tape was dried and brittle. She didn’t remember seeing them before, which meant they had been up there for years. The first box she opened was full of photographs of the children when they were younger. She recognized several images that she already had framed around the house, and guessed that they were duplicates.
The second box she opened took her breath away for a minute. It was full of letters in various handwriting, and the photographs mixed in with them made her smile. She remembered the box now. They were old love letters and photographs of three of the men in her life, the three most important ones since her marriage. She had thrown away other letters and photographs a long time ago. But she had saved everything from these three men. She hadn’t thought about them in years, nor heard from them. She stared at the familiar faces in the pictures. Jacques Masson was an ambitious young French chef who was working at a restaurant in New York and dreamed of opening his own when she met him. Bob Holland was a brilliant young venture capitalist, working with high-tech investments and just starting out in his first big job with high hopes for his career. And Andy Wyatt was a cowboy from Wyoming. She had met him when she’d taken the kids to a ranch there one summer. She had been madly in love with Andy and they had continued their affair discreetly for over a year, until she called a halt to it. She knew it could go nowhere. They both did. It was getting too intense to be safe for either of them. They knew they had to stop but couldn’t. Ending it with him had been one of the most painful things she’d ever done, but it wasn’t the right fit for her, or her kids, or him.