grass glowed emerald, made more striking by the sharp white border, numbers, and grid that ran across it. There was a comfort to the orderliness of it all with its bear logo in the center and Belmar spelled out in a swirl of silver and blue.
The marching band took the field with the piccolo player Max had teased her about having a soft spot for. She forgot all about the camera and watched the director mount a white ladder to lead them. Once he made the first slash down with his arm, they took off without seeming to need direction at all. The fight song, words still escaping her, moved her anyway and so did the flash of bright uniforms and brass fanning out in a variety of shapes and patterns to the applause of the crowd.
It was the crowd that made everything great, the spectators blurring in team colors and vibrating with energy. She’d photographed some of them one at a time, but from the end zone, they were one.
Years before, she'd read something about coral reefs. They’d always seemed like a structure to her, one continuous thing, like a rocky mountain ridge that just happened to occur under the water and not above it. She should have known they were living things, living individuals that formed a community of one. Standing there, seeing that kind of community, she wished she could take that picture, but it was too much to get in one frame, too much for one image to capture, and there was no need to try. She’d just enjoy being there.
She handed the camera to Max, and he held it in his palm as if testing the weight of it. "Think you got it?"
She smiled. "I did." She watched him head down the bleachers. "I just can’t seem to keep it."
Staying to witness the exit of the marching band, she waved at the piccolo player, and smiled at her own weaknesses, some large enough to take her down. She should just leave, leave the stadium, leave Belmar probably. Leave Max certainly. She saw him clear the last row of bleachers and look up at her. She certainly didn’t need to follow him. She’d taken her shots, and he didn’t need her, but he smiled and she found herself making her way down the aisle. It was a pleasure to see him work. She wasn’t following him because he’d smiled at her in invitation.
He turned when he realized she was behind him, and she caught the burst of football players beginning their second half. She had a second half too. If she was lucky, she did. Maybe she’d hit forty and keel over from the sheer fright of it, but she doubted she’d be that lucky. She was born to be a plodder and to just keep going until she wore down enough to plod herself right into her own grave. Well, hell. She took a deep breath. That was depressing as hell.
What she needed was to concentrate on the difficulty of the moment not the difficulty of a long and grinding life. And the difficulty of the moment was rationalizing why she was closing the distance between her and Max. It wasn’t because walking behind him she could see he still had a great, great butt. She hadn’t even noticed that. She might be willing to admit that when she’d handed him the camera and the wind ruffled his hair, she’d felt something like longing. But that’s what a plodder felt in the presence of a sprinter. And that was the real reason she followed him. Sprinters had passion, the obvious kind, but the other kind too.
She cleared the bleachers and saw him make his way around the side of the stadium where he spotted a pair of brothers playing catch with their young dad. The camera and Max were indistinguishable. He just seemed to see the photo and capture it. The angles he took of the boys seemed so odd to her. She wanted to know what the picture looked like from there because it wasn’t where she would have stood or the way she would have leaned. It was pure Max.
She'd always loved seeing people do what they were meant to do. Max lost Max with a camera. He seemed to connect with something greater and just flowed so unselfconsciously. She felt a stab of envy then realized she felt some of that when she cooked. She’d not thought of it that way, but