By the Book by Mary Kay McComas Page B

eventually died of something else, leaving Gunther with no one to leave the shop to, so he left it to my father. As a sort of thank-you, I guess. And I suppose he thought someone like my father would appreciate a camera shop. So, according to the lawyer, my father showed up here about six years after the man died, and stayed. Paid the taxes. Painted the house. Opened the shop and settled in.”
    “Huh,” she said, too wrapped up in the story to recall her attitude. “That’s amazing. Did Gunther and your father ever actually meet?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, stopping at a red light and glancing at her. The amazing thing was how easy she was to talk to. All he had to do was answer the questions she wasn’t too shy or too apathetic to ask. She was genuinely interested in people—in him—and it showed.
    “How old is your father?”
    “Seventy-eight.”
    “Then he would have been about seventy when he came here.” A pause. “I was just thinking that he should have opened a portrait studio or something here, so he could keep taking pictures, instead of just selling cameras. But maybe he was feeling too old for that. You know, I don’t think I ever saw him out taking pictures around town. And I never heard talk about him being famous. Do you think he stopped taking pictures altogether when he came here?”
    “I don’t know,” he said again, pulling into the parking lot beside Pappino’s Italian Restaurant. When he’d parked and turned the engine off, he looked at her. There was such a sad expression on her face that he couldn’t help asking, “Why? Why do you ask that? What are you thinking?”
    “Just how hard it is to give up something you love like that. He wears glasses, I know. Maybe his eyes got so bad that he couldn’t see well enough to take great shots anymore. That would be a horrible thing to have to admit to himself. Maybe he had nowhere else to go. Maybe he came here to sit out the rest of his life, waiting to die.”
    “Maybe,” he said, and because his heart was overflowing with a venomous hatred and the air around him was heating with anger, he got out of the car. He stood there for a moment, gulping the cool evening air, trying to forget that his father had given him up long before he’d given up his beloved camera; that they both could have had a place to go in times of need if he’d been any kind of father to him.
    It didn’t help to remember. He sighed. It didn’t help to remember because it wasn’t enough to make him turn his back on the man now, when he wanted to most.
    “Jonah?” He turned and looked at her over the roof of the car. “I’m sorry. I can see I’ve upset you. I didn’t—”
    “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not you. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d say more things like that.” He laughed softly at how strange that sounded and walked around the car to her. “Say whatever comes to your mind. Say what you’re thinking.” He shook his head. “Because I don’t know what to think. I don’t know him, Ellen. He’s my father and a complete stranger. Sometimes I hate him so much, I could kill him with his pillow. Sometimes I sit for hours staring at him, trying to see my face in his, to read his mind, to understand him. I don’t even know where to begin.” He took a step closer to her. Close enough to touch her. “What you said just now ... about him giving up his photography and how it must have hurt him. I understand that. If it’s true, I ... I can’t say I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make me happy either.” He studied her face for a moment. He found comfort in it, and the acceptance he needed to go on. “But it’s something, one thing, that I can understand about him.”
    She didn’t think about the inclination to reach out to him, to touch him. She just did it. Palming his cheek was the most natural thing to do, no matter what kind of person she was.
    She didn’t say anything. What was there to say? That he was hurting and