could be—”
“Subtle as a train wreck, Dad.”
“He’s a fine boy. And his parents adore you.”
“He’s looking ahead toward college now. He might not have much time for high school girlfriends. Though you could send me to BU with him,” Jordan began. “Their photography courses—”
“Nice try, missy.” Her father looked out over the lake. “The fish aren’t biting.” And neither was he.
Taro, Jordan’s black Labrador, raised her muzzle from where she’d been sunning on the dock as Jordan and her dad walked back to shore. Jordan snapped a shot of their side-by-side silhouettes thrown across the water-warped wood, wondering what four silhouettes would look like. Please, Jordan prayed, thinking of the unknown Mrs. Weber, please let me like you.
A SLIM HAND extended as blue eyes smiled. “How lovely to meet you at last.”
Jordan shook hands with the woman her father had just ushered into the sitting room. Anneliese Weber was small and slender, dark hair swept into a glossy knot at her nape, a string of gray pearls her only jewelry. A dark floral dress, darned but spotless gloves, quiet elegance with touches of wear and tear. Her face was young—she was twenty-eight, according to Jordan’s dad—but her eyes looked older. Of course they did; she was a war widow with a young child, starting over in a new country.
“Very pleased to meet you,” Jordan said sincerely. “This must be Ruth!” The child at Anneliese Weber’s side was darling; blond pigtails and a blue coat and a grave expression. Jordan extended a hand, but Ruth shrank back.
“She’s shy,” Anneliese apologized. Her voice was clear and low, almost no trace of a German accent. Just a little softness on the V’s. “Ruth’s world has been very unsettled.”
“I didn’t like strangers at your age either,” Jordan told Ruth. Not true, really, but something about Ruth’s wary little face made Jordan long to put her at ease. She also longed to take Ruth’s picture—those round cheeks and blond braids would just eat up the lens. Jordan’s father took the coats, and Jordan dashed into the kitchen to check the meatloaf. By the time she came out, whipping off the towel she’d tucked around her waist to protect her green Sunday taffeta, her father had poured drinks. Ruth sat on the couch with a glass of milk, as Anneliese Weber sipped sherry and surveyed the room. “A lovely home. You’re young to keep house for your father, Jordan, but you do it very well.”
Nice of her to lie, Jordan approved. The McBride house always looked mussed: a narrow brownstone three stories up and down on the lace-curtain side of South Boston; the stairs steep, the couches worn and comfortable, the rugs always skidding askew. Anneliese Weber did not seem like the type who approved of anything being askew, with her spine ramrod straight and every hair in place, but she looked around the room with approval. “Did you take this?” She gestured to a photograph of the Boston Common, mist wrapped and tilted at an angle that made everything look otherworldly, a dream landscape. “Your father tells me you are quite a … What is the word? A snapper?”
“Yes.” Jordan grinned. “Can I take your picture later?”
“Don’t encourage her.” Jordan’s dad guided Anneliese to the couch with a reverent touch to the small of her back, smiling. “Jordan already spends too much time staring through a lens.”
“Better than staring at a mirror or at a film screen,” Anneliese replied unexpectedly. “Young girls should have more on their minds than lipstick and giggling, or they will grow from silly girls to sillier women. You take classes for it—picture-taking?”
“Wherever I can.” Since Jordan was fourteen she’d been signing up for whatever photography classes she could pay for out of her allowance, and sneaking into college courses wherever she could find a professor willing to wink at the presence of a knock-kneed junior high schooler lurking in the back row. “I take classes, I study on my own, I practice—”
“One has to be serious about something in order to be good at it,” Anneliese said, approving. A warm glow started in Jordan’s chest. Serious. Good. Her father never saw Jordan’s photography that way. “Messing about with a camera,” he’d say, shaking his head. “Well, you’ll grow out of it.” I’m not going to grow out of it, Jordan had replied at fifteen. I’m going to be the next Margaret Bourke-White.
Margaret who? he’d responded, laughing. He laughed nicely, indulgently—but he’d still laughed.
Anneliese didn’t laugh. She looked at Jordan’s photograph and nodded approval. For the first time Jordan allowed herself to think the word: Stepmother …?
At the dining room table Jordan had set with the Sunday china, Anneliese asked questions about the antiques shop as Jordan’s father heaped her plate with the choicest cuts of everything. “I know an excellent treatment to make colored glass shine,” she said as he talked about a set of Tiffany lamps acquired at an estate sale. She quietly corrected Ruth’s grip on her fork as she listened to Jordan talk about her school’s forthcoming dance. “Surely you have a date, a pretty girl like you.”
“Garrett Byrne,” Jordan’s father said, forestalling her. “A nice young man, joined up to be a pilot at the end of the war. He never saw combat, though. Got a medical discharge when he broke his leg during training. You’ll meet him Sunday, if you’d care to accompany us to Mass.”
“I would like that. I’ve been trying so hard to make friends in Boston. You go every week?”
“Of course.”
Jordan coughed into her napkin. She and her father hardly went to Mass more than twice a year, Easter and Christmas, but now he sat there at the head of the table positively radiating piety. Anneliese smiled, also radiating piety, and Jordan mused about courting couples on their best behavior. She saw it every day in the halls at school, and apparently the older generation was no different. Maybe there was a photo-essay in that: a series of comparison photographs, courting couples of all ages, highlighting the similarities that transcended age. With the right titles and captions, it might make a piece strong enough to submit to a magazine or newspaper …
Plates were cleared, coffee brought out. Jordan cut the Boston cream pie Anneliese had brought. “Though I don’t know why you call it pie,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. “It’s cake, and don’t tell an Austrian any differently. We know cake, in Austria.”
“You speak such good English,” Jordan ventured. She couldn’t tell yet about Ruth, who hadn’t spoken a word.
“I studied it at school. And my husband spoke it for business, so I practiced with him.”
Jordan wanted to ask how Anneliese had lost her husband, but her father shot her a warning glance. He’d already given clear instructions: “You’re not to ask Mrs. Weber about the war, or her husband. She’s made it quite clear it was a painful time.”
“But don’t we want to know everything about her?” Much as Jordan wanted her father to have someone special in his life, it still had to be the right someone. “Why is that wrong?”
“Because people aren’t obliged to drag out their old hurts or dirty laundry just because of your need to know,” he answered. “No one wants to talk about a war after they’ve lived through it, Jordan McBride. So don’t go prying where you’ll be hurting feelings, and no wild stories
