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By Root 866 0

the bank, fly out across the beach and land in a pool that, given the water’s dark color, looked to be several feet deep. Abbie unrolled her clothes and found the soap. She stared at me, that sneaky look in her eye. “When in Rome…” She slipped off her shirt, untied the scarf and hovered across the white sandy beach. After everything, she still gets to me. She is still the most beautiful woman on the planet. The water was knee-deep and coppery bronze. The sun dipped behind dark clouds, which pushed out the rain that then fell in large drops that smacked the water and trees. The rain was cold but the river was warm, so we slipped down to our shoulders, our chins skimming the water’s surface. It was one of those moments. Blink and you’ll miss it. Water dripped off the lobes of her ears and tip of her nose, steam rose off the water in miniature twisters that spiraled up through the trees in quiet dissipation while the clouds emptied themselves. If there’s glory in the heavens, it was being poured out on my wife.

I grabbed the bottle of scuppernong, pulled the cork and let her lay in the cradle of me. I leaned into the river and we sipped silently, watching the moisture spin upward. The rain slowed and she said, “Bathe me.” So I did. When the sun cracked back through the clouds, I spread the tarp on the beach, zipped us into her sleeping bag and we slept off the wine. It was an hour’s worth of sleep that felt like a week.

After we woke, I was folding up the bag and she slapped me on the butt. “Three down. Seven to go.”

She was right. We’d just checked off numbers 3, 4 and 10. Abbie had a way of making me forget the hell we were living in. This moment was no exception. I loaded the canoe, laid her down in the center and cut the paddle into the water. Only then did I realize that the shotgun was gone.

15

A few minutes after 5 p.m., a 5 Series BMW with dark windows parked at the meter in front of my door. She rolled down the window and waved at me. I locked up and set my easel, a blank framed canvas and two fishing tackle boxes filled with paints and brushes in her trunk. Another woman sat in the front seat so I hopped in the back. Abbie turned around and introduced me. “Doss, this is Rosalia.”

Rosalia was heavy-set, maybe mid-fifties, probably South American and had evidently spent a good bit of time in the sun. She turned toward me, offered a calloused, dry hand. Her eyes were baggy, she had no eyebrows to speak of, her nose was crooked, one ear was missing and she had no teeth.

We drove across town, toward some docks and large warehouses. Abbie talked while shifting gears. “We set up this studio for last-minute shoots. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.”

The warehouse was cool, expansive and, thanks to the concrete floor, every whisper echoed back at you. In the center, a gray curtain hung across a cable stretched taut between two poles. Studio lighting, comprised of dozens of different types of lights, angled toward the curtain. Some shot up from the floor, some were direct, others filtered down onto a black mat and small stool.

Rosalia wore a long dark brown skirt, a large dirty white apron and old running shoes—one of which was untied due to a broken lace. Her top was a baggy lavender uniform shirt that most “house help” had been either told or conditioned to wear. Something about her struck me as off, but I couldn’t quite place it. Something was off balance.

Abbie sat Rosalia on the stool, whispered something, then moved to a control box and began flipping lights on and off. Rosalia sat on the stool wiping her hands on her apron. Abbie spent several minutes considering the lighting. She’d turn one on, add another to it, turn a third off, only to immediately add accent with a fourth. She turned to me. “What do you think?”

“I like it, but if you add something soft at her feet, it might get the feel I think you’re looking for.” She flipped another switch, chewed on her lip and then swigged from a water bottle. Finally, she nodded.

She grabbed my hand, led me to Rosalia and spoke in Spanish. “Rosalia, this is