The Vineyard Read Free

hear it now.
    Returning to the porch, she was drawn in with an open arm, reconnected to this group as they were connected to one another. Everyone touched—a hand, an arm, a shoulder, a cheek. They were nine people spanning three generations, surviving the bleakness of their lives by taking comfort in family. They had nothing by way of material goods, only one another.
    Olivia was thirty-five. She had a ten-year-old daughter, a job, an apartment with a TV and VCR, a computer, and a washer and dryer. She had a car. She had a Patagonia vest, L.L.Bean clogs, and a Nikon that was old enough and sturdy enough to fetch a pretty penny.
    But boy, did she envy that migrant family its closeness.
    â€œThose were hard times,” came a gruff voice by her shoulder.
    She looked up to see her boss, Otis Thurman, scowling at the photograph. It was one of several that had been newly uncovered, believed to be the work of Dorothea Lange. The Metropolitan Museumin New York had commissioned him to restore them. Olivia was doing the work.
    â€œThey were
simpler
times,” she said.
    He grunted. “You want ‘em? Take ‘em. I’m leaving. Lock up when you go.” He walked off with less shuffle than another man of seventy-five might have, but then, Otis had his moods to keep him sharp. He had been in something of a snit all day, but after five years in his employ, Olivia knew not to take it personally. Otis was a frustrated Picasso, a would-be painter who would never be as good at creation as he was at restoration. But hope died hard, even at his age. He was returning to his canvas and oil full-time—seven weeks away from retirement and counting.
    He was looking forward to it. Olivia was not.
    He kept announcing the hours. Olivia tried not to hear.
    We’re a good team,
she argued.
I’m too old,
he replied.
    And that was what intrigued her about this migrant family. The old man in the photograph was grizzled enough to make Otis look young, but he was still there, still productive, still part of that larger group.
    Things were different nowadays. People burned out, and no wonder. They were up on the high wire of life alone with no net.
    Olivia worried about Otis retiring, pictured him sitting alone day after day, with art tools that he couldn’t use to his own high standards and no one to bully. He wasn’t going to be happy.
    Wrong, Olivia
. He had friends all over the art community and plenty of money saved up. He would be delighted.
She
was the one in trouble.
    She had finally found her niche. Restoring old photographs was a natural for someone with a knowledge of cameras and an eye for art—and she had both, though it had taken her awhile to see it. Trial and error was the story of her life. She had waitressed. She had done telemarketing. She had sold clothes. Selling cameras had come after that, along with the discovery that she loved taking pictures. Then had come Tess. Then brief stints apprenticing with a professional photographer and freelancing for a museum that wanted pictures of its shows. Then Otis.
    For the first time in her life, Olivia truly loved her work. She was better at photo restoration than she had been at anything else, and could lose herself for
hours
in prints from the past, smelling the age,feeling the grandeur. For Olivia, the world of yesterday was more romantic than today. She would have liked to have lived back then.
    Given that she couldn’t, she liked working for Otis, and the feeling was mutual. Few people in her life had put up with her for five years. Granted, she indulged him his moods, and even he acknowledged that she did the job better than the long line of assistants before her.
    Still, he genuinely liked her. The eight-by-ten tacked to the wall proved it. He had taken it last week when she had shown up at work with her hair cut painfully short. She had chopped it off herself in a fit of disgust, irritated with long hair in the sweltering heat. Immediately