CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTINGRID
“Two Strangers in Pear-a-dise” the waitress says and places the cocktails in front of us. I take a sip, pick out the promised flavors on my tongue: pear, rosemary, and lemon.
Travis and I are at The Leaning Pear, a cool, family-owned spot perched above Cypress Creek, all warm cedar walls and sleek floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water. We’re tucked into a corner table, half-hidden from the rest of the room, and, if I’m being honest, it’s fun playing incognito with this good-looking man. It gives me a silly high, knowing that he’s willing to jump through some hoops to see me. We’re not being particularly bad, but the feeling of doing something I’m not supposed to makes me squirm in my seat in the best way. It’s just the distraction I need.
The waitress returns with our appetizers, fried brussels sprouts and hummus with sautéed mushrooms. I’ve already learned that Travis is from Indiana and has three older brothers. One’s a surgeon, one’s a criminal court judge, and the oldest runs a tech company in Chicago.
“Quite the impressive lineup,” I say.
He laughs under his breath, part pride, part long-suffering sigh. “Yeah. They set the bar pretty damn high. Then there was me—baby of the family, professional troublemaker. I got away with everything. A certified mama’s boy.”
He tells me that when his brothers were rough on him, his momwould come to his rescue, swatting at the older boys and scooping little Travis into her arms. And when the brothers were nice to him, Travis would make things up, cry crocodile tears, just to get that same reaction from her. “I was addicted to attention,” he says without an ounce of shame.
“Was?” I ask.
He smirks sheepishly.
“So how’d you end up in Texas?”
He shrugs. “Preston High had an open teaching position.” He scoops hummus onto a triangle of pita. “So what does the mysterious Ingrid do?”
I take another sip of my drink. “I’m a client relations manager. Which is just a fancy way of saying I answer emails all day.”
“How’d you get into that?”
When I was young, I thought I’d be a photographer. Izzy and I imagined traveling the world, her soaking up experiences and discovering her path along the way, while I documented, capturing reality. The world seemed so big and full of possibility then.
I stir the ice in my glass. “I just needed a job. What about you? How did you end up in teaching?” Travis teaches speech and journalism. He also advises for the yearbook and helps with UIL competitions. He says he loves teaching kids how to ask the right questions. “I bet you wanted to be a news anchor.” It isn’t hard to imagine him on a television screen. And maybe everyone had a dream when they were young, when their own hunger felt bigger than the world, bigger than common sense and practicality. “All that attention-seeking behavior,” I tease.
He sits up, adjusts a pretend tie. He has to know how devilishly handsome he is. He picks up his fork and holds it like a microphone. His voice drops half an octave—smooth, practiced. “I’m here today with the enigmatic Ingrid Whitmore. Perhaps she’ll tell us some more of the secrets she’s been hiding.” He holds out the fork to me across the table, that dimple showing when he smiles.
I look down to my drink again.
“Actually,” he sits back, rests his arms on the back of the booth. “I just always wanted to teach.”
“Oh?” I say, surprised by his answer.
“Yeah, I had this great theater teacher in high school, Mrs. Calloway. When you walked into her class, whoever you were out in the hallways, whoever you were at home, none of that mattered. There was this guy, Tony Fritz. Big varsity lineman, right? Imagine it, imagine the biggest guy you knew in school, the toughest guy that no one would ever jack with.” He’s acting it out, sitting up in his seat, puffing up his shoulders, arms out as if they rested on giant lats to display the breadth of Tony Fritz. “Tony takes the class because he figures it’s an easy A, but Mrs. Calloway cast him as Lennie.Of Mice and Men.”
He pauses, maybe to gauge my interest or maybe to confirm I know what he’s talking about. I crunch my brow together and smirk. “I’m familiar.”
“Okay, good. By the time we were polishing our lines in rehearsals a week before opening night, Mrs. Calloway had Big Fritz totally in character, bawling his eyes out up onstage in front of everyone in class like he really was Lennie. Her love for teaching was infectious. After that, Tony was all in. He still does local theater back home.”
I laugh. He’s been leaning in while he talks, words getting faster, and my own heart quickens along with his passion.
“There’s just something about kids at that age, you know? It’s intoxicating. It’s like they’re right on the edge of everything. Ready to be molded.”
He looks at me. I feel the heat in my cheeks.
“What would you want to do?” he asks. Really asks. As if I’m one of his students, as if he wants to know something about me beyond what I present to the world, wants to know a deeper part of me. “If you didn’t have to answer all those emails?”
“Take pictures,” I say, swept up in the moment.
He cocks an eyebrow.
I tell him about the time Izzy and I found a box in the bottomdrawer of the china cabinet. Pictures of Mom when she was nineteen, on a trip to the beach in Galveston with friends, boys with ’70s shorty-short swim trunks and girls in skimpy bathing suits and terry cloth rompers, all the photos slightly out of focus and yellow with age, a sunburnt dream. In my favorite picture, Mom, in her lime-green bikini, is shin deep in the ocean, eyes squinted from smiling. She looks absolutely stunning.
The young woman on the beach—she was my mother, but she also wasn’t. It filled me with wonder while also making my heart ache, seeing a version of her that no longer existed. A young woman I’d never be able to meet. Photography was magic. It could cheat time. It could capture a person as she existed within a single point. It made me realize we aren’t a single self. We are a series of selves, layered atop each other like a stack of negatives.