Harlan Coben: Just One Look

“Definitely.”

Grace took advantage of the pause to wave good-bye, pull open the door, and disappear inside the Photomat. The glass door closed with a snap, ringing a little bell. The chemical smell, not unlike model glue, hit her first. She wondered about the long-term effects of working in such an environment and decided the short-term ones were annoying enough.

The kid working-Grace’s use of the term working being overly generous here-behind the counter had a white fuzz pellet under his chin, hair dyed a color that’d intimidate Crayola, and enough piercings to double as a wind instrument. One of those wrap-around-low headphones snaked around the back of his neck. The music was so loud that Grace could feel it in her chest. He had tattoos, lots of them. One read STONE. Another read KILLJOY. Grace thought that a third should read SLACKER.

“Excuse me?”

He did not look up.

“Excuse me?” she said a little louder.

Still nothing.

“Yah, like, dude?”

That got his attention. He snarled up, narrowed his eyes, offended by the interruption. He removed the headphones but grudgingly. “Stub.”

“Pardon me?”

“Stub.”

Ah. Grace handed him the receipt. Fuzz Pellet then asked her for her name. This reminded Grace of those damn customer service phones that ask you to dial in your home phone, and then as soon as you get a real live person, they ask you for the same phone number. Like the first request was just for practice.

Fuzz Pellet-Grace was warming up to this nickname-flipped through a file of photo packets before extracting one. He ripped off the tag and told her an exorbitant price. She handed him a Val-Pak coupon, one dug out of her purse in an excavation that rivaled the search for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and watched the price drop to something closer to reasonable.

He handed her the packet of photographs. Grace thanked him, but he already had the music plugged back into his cerebrum. She waved in his direction. “I come not for the pictures,” Grace said, “but for the sparkling repartee.”

Fuzz Pellet yawned and picked up his magazine. The latest issue of Modern Slacker .

Grace hit the sidewalk. The weather was brisk. Autumn had shoved summer aside with a patented gust. The leaves hadn’t really started turning yet, but the air had that apple-cider quality to it. The shop windows had started up with the Halloween decorations. Emma, her third grader, had convinced Jack to buy an eight-foot blowup Homer-Simpson-as-Frankenstein balloon. It looked, she had to admit, terrific. Her children liked The Simpsons , which meant that maybe, despite their best efforts, she and Jack were raising them right.

Grace wanted to slit open the envelope now. There was always an excitement with a newly developed roll of film, an opening-a-gift expectation, a hurry-to-the-mailbox-even-though-it’s-always-bills rush that digital photography, for all its conveniences, could never duplicate. But there wasn’t time before school let out.

As her Saab climbed up Heights Road, she took a small detour so that she could pass the town’s lookout. From here, the skyline of Manhattan, especially at night, lay spread out like diamonds on black velvet. The longing tugged at her. She loved New York City. Until four years ago, that wonderful island had been their home. They’d had a loft on Charles Street down in the Village. Jack worked on the medical research for a large pharmaceutical company. She painted in her home studio while scoffing at her suburban counterparts and their SUVs and corduroy pants and toddler-referenced dialogues. Now she was one of them.

Grace parked behind the school with the other mothers. She turned the engine off, picked up the Photomat envelope, and ripped it open. The roll was from last week’s annual trip to Chester for apple picking. Jack had snapped away. He liked being the family photographer. He considered it paternal manly work, taking the photos, as if this was a sacrifice a father was supposed to make for his family.

The first image was of Emma, their eight-year-old daughter, and Max, their six-year-old son, on the hayride, shoulders hunched, their cheeks reddened by wind. Grace stopped and stared for a moment. Feelings of, yes, maternal warmth, both primitive and evolutionary, rocked her back. That was the thing with kids. It was the little things that got to you. She’d remembered that it had been cold that day. The orchard, she knew, would be too crowded. She had not wanted to go. Now, looking at this photograph, she wondered about the idiocy of her priorities.

The other mothers were gathering by the school fence, making small talk and planning play-dates. It was, of course, the modern era, post-feminist America, and yet, of the roughly eighty parents waiting for their charges, only two were male. One, she knew, was a father who’d been laid off for more than a year. You could see it in his eyes, his slow shuffle, the missed spots when he shaved. The other guy was a stay-at-home journalist who always seemed a little too anxious to chat up the moms. Lonely maybe. Or something else.

Someone knocked on the car window. Grace looked up. Cora Lindley, her best friend in town, signaled for her to unlock the door. Grace did. Cora slid into the passenger seat next to her.

“So how did the date go last night?” Grace asked.

“Poorly.”

“Sorry.”

“Fifth-date syndrome.”

Cora was a divorcee, a little too sexy for the nervous, ever-protective “ladies who lunch.” Clad in a low-cut, leopard-print blouse with spandex pants and pink pumps, Cora most assuredly did not fit in with the stream of khakis and loose sweaters. The other mothers eyed her with suspicion. Adult suburbia can be a lot like high school.

“What’s fifth-date syndrome?” Grace asked.

“You’re not dating much, are you?”

“Well, no,” Grace said. “The husband and two kids have really cramped my style.”

“Pity. See-and don’t ask me why-but on the fifth date, the guys always raise the subject… how should I word this delicately?… of a ménage à trois.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I joke with you not. Fifth date. At the latest. The guy asks me, on a purely theoretical basis, what my opinion is on ménage à trois. Like it’s peace in the Middle East.”

“What do you say?”

“That I usually enjoy them, especially when the two men start French-kissing.”

Grace laughed and they both got out of the car. Grace’s bad leg ached. After more than a decade, she shouldn’t be self-conscious about it anymore, but Grace still hated for people to see the limp. She stayed by the car and watched Cora walk away. When the bell rang, the kids burst out as if they’d been fired from a cannon. Like every other parent, Grace only had eyes for her own. The rest of the pack, uncharitable as this might sound, was scenery.

Max emerged in the second exodus. When Grace saw her son-one sneaker lace untied, his Yu-Gi-Oh! backpack looking four sizes too big, his New York Rangers knit hat tilted to the side like a tourist’s beret-the warmth rushed over anew. Max made his way down the stairs, adjusting the backpack up his shoulders. She smiled. Max spotted her and smiled back.

He hopped in the back of the Saab. Grace strapped him into the booster seat and asked him how his day was. Max answered that he didn’t know. She asked him what he did in school that day. Max answered that he didn’t know. Did he learn math, English, science, arts and crafts? Answer: Shrug and dunno. Grace nodded. A classic case of the epidemic known as Elementary-School Alzheimer’s. Were the kids drugged to forget or sworn to secrecy? One of life’s mysteries.

It was not until after she got home and gave Max his Go-GURT snack-think yogurt in a toothpaste-like squeeze tube-that Grace had the chance to take a look at the rest of the photographs.