Calculated Exposure (2 page)

Curt looked up when a young woman slipped onto the bench beside him with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. She pushed shiny blond locks behind one ear and smiled at him. “Hello.”

“Hey.” Pleasantries aside, he returned his gaze to the sandbox. There was a new addition. “Play nice, Emma.”

“Okay!” the tot called back.

He resumed his composition.

While it is certainly your prerogative to decide not to work with me after this term, I hope you would not act so rashly. You said yourself after we got word part of my analysis would be published in
AJM
–you wanted your association to me to be evident. We both know the school isn’t well-known for high-level mathematics, but I chose to matriculate because you and the department chair convinced me your tutelage would help me segue from academia into a profitable career. Remember? I said I didn’t want to be a professor?

A sandy clump fell onto his screen and he looked up at Adam extending a hand full of the slushy stuff. “Is it show and tell time, bud?”

Adam coughed, sputtering sand onto Curt’s face and glasses. Curt exhaled through his mouth and removed his spectacles before wiping his face clean with his shirtsleeve. “Guess you got your roughage for the day.”

“Blech.”

“I bet.”

“Aww, little kids do the craziest stuff,” the woman at his left proffered. “Aren’t you a cutie?”

Glasses now clean, Curt stared at the woman giving his godson a thousand-watt smile.

Adam shook his head.

“Here, do you want a wipie? For your handsies?” She rummaged in her oversized bag and extracted a slick little white case, which when opened revealed neatly-stacked wet wipes. She peeled one off and handed it to Curt.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.” She snapped the case shut and stuffed it into her bag before lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “My charge there, Steffie, she can’t go anywhere without making a mess of herself.”

Curt wiped what he could of the sand off Adam’s tongue and lips, then sent him on his way. “And yet you’re letting her play in the dirt?”

She shrugged. “Her mother insists I bring her. Of course, she’s not the one who has to bathe the child.”

“Ah.” Curt tossed the soiled cloth into the nearby trashcan and finally turned his full attention to the nanny. He emitted an appreciative grunt. Just a
little
one. Nice blue eyes, fair-to-middling lips, okay tits. Looking downward, he catalogued her long legs and dainty sandal-shod feet. By the time his gaze completed its circuit back to her face, a solicitous grin spanned her cheeks.

Guessing she’d be a four out of ten in the sack.

He mirrored her grin–out of politeness, really–and let it droop before he’d even looked away. Normally he would have carried on the flirting, perhaps even transmitting some not-so-subtle clues that he was both virile and eligible, but for once his more evolved head took the lead. He continued his email.

Considering I have a time-sensitive job offer, I am as invested in graduating this semester as you are in seeing me do so. I only need to present at one conference, isn’t that correct? It’ll get done and I’ll teach my classes as assigned. While the family issue does take precedence at the moment, please don’t assume my lack of visibility on campus equates to a lack of ambition.

On that note, he looked up to find Emma rubbing watery eyes and opening her mouth in a wide yawn.

Shit.

I’ll be back in the US Monday evening. I know you find this entire situation with my mother distasteful, but you recruited me in spite of it. Please don’t express annoyance when after all these years I’ve decided to investigate it personally.

Again, my goal is to finish this semester, and I’m fairly certain I will, but I would hope an additional semester wouldn’t cause you inconvenience.

He reviewed his response and shrugged before committing it to his send box. Poetry it was not, but the message was a far cry better than the
fuck off
he’d initially typed upon reading the good doctor’s manifesto.

“Adam, come. Emma, come.” He sidled to the sandbox edge and the children stood without fuss. Definitely tired.

“Oh! Are you leaving?” the nanny asked.

God, they’re always pretty until they open their mouths. Is common sense really that rare a thing?

Internal dialogue aside, he nodded and smiled brightly as he dusted off the kids’ clothes. “Yes. Nap time, I think.”

“Aww.” Stooping down to meet the kids at eye level, she raised her voice to sing-song pitch. “I understand. Time for sweepies!”

Curt rolled his eyes, but by the time she straightened up, he wore a smile. His friends had put him on a five-year de-assholing plan. He was in year six. Some lessons were obviously harder than others, but the good news was he hadn’t seen the inside of a police car in three years. “Bye, then.”

She extended one limp-wristed hand to shake or kiss or–hell, he didn’t know. “Nice meeting you.”

He released Emma’s hand and shook the nanny’s.

She transferred a slip of paper into his palm and quickly pulled her hand back.

Fuck.

With a little finger wave and a giggle, she whispered, “Bye, now.”

“Right.” He tucked the number into his pocket, skimming the edges of a heavy stock business card in the process, and put Emma on his hip.

Don’t hold your breath, lady.

She looked like the kind of woman who wanted a boyfriend, and he didn’t want to be that, not for any woman. He refused commitment or anything resembling it, and for good reason.

Chapter 2

Erica trailed her fingertips along the lobby’s polished, wooden chair rail and made a cursory glace of placards as she sought the exhibition’s beginning. The framed photographs comprising the student art show elicited emotions from her that had less to do with the subject matter and more to do with the talent presented in it. Those kids had
verve
. They probably had no idea how their formal art training gave them a leg up, and not even so much for skill, but confidence. That was the rub.

Upon approaching a black-and-white diptych, she shook her head and scoffed. What part of the brain were these kids using that she obviously had no gateway to? How mature were they to be creating these compilations? On one half of the study before her was a close-up shot of long, elegant fingers belonging to what was apparently a very fine woman, given all her diamonds and immaculate manicure, holding a wine goblet’s delicate stem. The second half featured a vagrant’s dirt-caked fingernails, digits gnarled into a fist wrapped around the neck of a paper sack-shrouded bottle.

“Wow. How’d she even come up with that? What possessed her to take a picture of either? Did she plan that in advance, or…” Erica squinted at the paper placard beneath the work. “A first-year student? Fuck.” She threw up her hands and backed away.

Really, there wasn’t anything to hate about her photos. They were simple portraits, crime scene shots, or rally captures meant to accompany newspaper prose. Straight-on shots. Nothing special. Nobody gave them much thought. They just took up space, or not, if breaking news pre-empted them. She was reasonably sure nothing she’d ever photographed had made anyone ruminate.

“That one’s my favorite,” came a soft voice from her left.

Erica yipped, having thought she was alone in the lobby, and turned to find a small-framed, very pregnant woman with long light brown hair and eyes as blue as the Caribbean smiling at her.

American.
Southern
.

Erica cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes. The world seemed rather small again. Did Americans congregate in Maynooth the way the Irish did in Boston?

“You work here?” Erica asked.

The woman shook her head. “My husband is a professor in the history department. I totter over every now and then with his lunch. Sometimes I pop in here for nostalgia.”

“Nostalgia? You’re a photographer?”
Please tell me you’re not as good as these kids.

“No, I never had any talent with that medium.” The woman stepped closer to the diptych, eyed the placard, and grunted her appreciation. “I studied art for a while when I was in college. I had to give it up, but I still regret switching majors.” She rubbed the top of her belly, idly it seemed, and let her forehead wrinkle. “Back then I was raging an internal battle between what I was good at and what would actually pay money.”

“What was your medium?”

“Drawing.” She laughed–a cute little snorting laugh she seemed completely unabashed by–and turned her bright gaze to Erica. With one corner of her mouth crooked upward into a smirk, she asked, “Who the hell can pay the bills with pencil drawings, right?”

“I see your point.” And she did. Sort of. She had never planned on becoming a photographer. It was just a job she was trying to make a career. Maybe. If it hadn’t been for her particular set of circumstances, she never would have thought photography was profitable. “Just out of curiosity, what’d you switch to?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Biology.”

“And?”

“
And
I ended being a police sketch artist for years before I moved here. Ain’t that a kick in the head? That’s not even art. That’s just a utilitarian chore that’s mostly being phased out by folks with fancy computer programs now. It’s a good thing I’m being kept. What the hell would I do with myself otherwise? Caricatures at carnivals?”

Erica shoved her hand into the pocket of her light jacket and fiddled with the spare lens cap left there for that exact purpose. “Kept?”

The woman shrugged. “Yet another thing I didn’t plan, but…” She looked off through the windows overlooking the campus for a moment, deep in thought. “You can’t always plan things. Other peoples’ plans become yours. Anyway, I had an appointment nearby today so I stopped in just to grab a few extra minutes away from my kids.”

Erica’s expression must have been rather telling, because the woman blushed and put up her hands. “I mean… Ugh.” She sighed, closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “They’re great. Really sweet kids, but they’ve got a lot of energy and I’m…”

“Tired?”

“Yes.” She stuffed her hands into her cardigan’s pockets and turned back to the diptych. “And with this one coming, I worry I won’t get ten consecutive minutes of peace for the next five or six years. I guess, though, I’m glad they’ll all be close in age. I knew this would be hard, but hard is one thing. Exhausting is a completely different ball of wax.”

“Hmm.” Erica moved along the wall with the woman and assessed the charcoal drawing along with her. “My mother had six,” Erica volunteered. The woman seemed to have an open ear, and Erica felt compelled to fill it. When would she have the chance to just
talk
again? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to unload without someone judging her or telling her Latina women didn’t whine.

She wanted to fucking whine.

“I was right in the middle,” she said with a chuckle. “The neglected one.”

Her “neglect” had been a bit of a running gag when she was a kid, up until it stopped being funny. No one ever noticed she was missing. The independence had been good in some ways. She’d learned how to be her own counsel and never asked for favors. Her mother was all about hearth and home and had no life outside the Desoto clan. Erica swore that would never be her–she wanted an identity.

At sunup her mother woke, fed them all, and got them out the door to their various jobs or school buses. She spent entire days with her back bent over grunt work, cleaning and cooking. She spent nights feeding everyone again, cleaning up their messes, washing their clothes. When she fell into bed every night next to the snoring husband who’d already been asleep for hours, she probably said her prayers on her back and thanked the lord for giving her another day to serve.

“
Mamí
, you’re like a slave,” Erica of age fourteen had once commented while her mother sweated over a steaming hot pot. “You’re smarter than this. You could do things.”

Her mother’s response had been something along the lines of, “You don’t know nothing. You’ll see. You gonna need someone to take care of you. You better learn your place.”

Even being a teenager, one who’d been raised Catholic and taught to obey, Erica had balked. “I’m going to be someone. Have my own things, like
abuela
said.”

Mamí
had stopped stirring and turned with a scowl on her flushed face. “You listen to a crazy old woman whose sharp tongue gonna get her shot one day, or you listen to your mother?”

One day, Erica ran.

She shook herself free of her reverie and rubbed her arms, feeling as though a chill had settled in, though the building was quite warm. The dreams would come back if she left that particular floodgate open. Best she change the subject. She cleared her throat and managed a small smile for her companion. “So, where are you from? You seem to have a bit of South in your mouth.”

The woman grinned and pushed some of that honey brown hair back from her face. It was even longer than Erica’s, but the length didn’t seem dated on her. The hair made her seem young, though she had to be close to thirty. It suited her.

“I guess I do, huh? Although, sometimes I hear myself talk and I hear my mother’s Yankee twang. I guess it depends who I’m speaking with. I grew up in North Carolina. In The Triangle. Lived there until three years ago.”

“No way!” Erica moved her camera bag to the other shoulder and shifted her weight. “This is turning into a really weird day for me. I live in Kannapolis. I just met a guy here on campus who goes to school in The Triangle.”

“Yeesh.” The woman cringed. “Uh, did that man happen to have two wild young’uns with him?”

“Yes, actually he did.”

She put up her hands. “Your coincidence just became less coincidental. Those little ruffians were probably my kids. I guess Curt’s walking them home now.” She rolled up her cardigan’s sleeve and focused at the clear gummy watch on her wrist. “Need to get them down for naps. I bet they’re giving him hell. Are you in the area for long?”