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“Did you make his clothes?” Jecca asked Mrs. Wingate.
“I may have made one or two,” she said modestly.
“Don’t let her kid you,” Lucy said as she began to clear the table. When Jecca started to get up to help, Lucy told her to stay seated. “I make everything with my machines, but Livie sews by hand.”
Mrs. Wingate smiled. “Not all of it. I put the garments together with a machine.”
Lucy gave a scoffing sound. “She has an old thing, the kind you change the needle on when it breaks.”
“When else do you change it?” Jecca asked, but not looking up from the photos. Tristan was about four now and smiling at the camera—and his grin showed his love for the photographer.
When the women were silent, she looked up and saw that they were staring at her. “What?” she asked.
“You need to see the new sewing machines in my workroom,& cmy at?#8221; Lucy said.
“I will.” Jecca looked back at the album. It was fascinating to see the man she was meeting as he grew up.
“I have to go to the shop,” Mrs. Wingate said as Jecca opened the second book.
“And I have a lot of sewing to do.”
“I’ll see you later.” Jecca kept her eyes on the pictures.
By seven years old, Tristan began to show the man he was going to grow into. Dark hair, blue eyes, a strong chin and jaw. It seemed that in every photo he was holding a frog, a kitten, or some animal. And sometimes there was an old stethoscope hanging around his neck.
There were several photos of Tristan with a tall, handsome young man who seemed to work in the garden. He was tossing a laughing Tristan about or giving him a piggyback ride. In the background was a lawn mower or a wheelbarrow. Jecca wondered who he was and if he’d been instrumental in nurturing Tristan’s love of plants.
As an artist, Jecca couldn’t help noticing that as the boy grew older, Mrs. Wingate’s photography skills began to improve. Instead of just snapshots with a busy background, she showed him bent over a book. The light from a single bulb surrounded him. “Look out Georges de la Tour,” she said.
There began to be labels. TRISTAN AT NINE, one said, and more changes came about. For one thing, the photos weren’t all taken on the Wingate property. Some were at a school, with Tristan hanging from monkey bars, waving as he went down a slide. Another one was of him with a toothless grin, looking out a school bus window.
In the fourth album, he had reached junior high school. As far as she could tell, Tristan Aldredge had not had an awkward stage. He didn’t seem to have gone through bad skin or gangly body or even a shyness with girls. From what she saw in the photos, he was a very popular young man. Every picture showed him laughing with other people, male and female. The girls looked at him as though he were an angel come to earth, and the boys seemed to consider him a friend.
There were sports photos—Tristan played both basketball and baseball—and pictures from a couple of dances.
The fifth album was high school, and Jecca saw a truly beautiful young man. It looked as though Mrs. Wingate attended most of the athletic events Tristan was in. There was a sweet picture of him with a girl with too much hair as they were dressed to go to a formal dance.
Jecca turned a page and gasped, for there was Tristan with a young Kim. She was about seven, and he was a tall, muscular, beautiful teenager. They were sitting on the grass in what she recognized as Mrs. Wingate’s back garden, and Kim was adorning him with flowers. He looked perfectly content, with no signs of impatience as though he’d rather be somewhere else.
On the next page, Tris had Kim riding on his shoulders and she was hanging on to his head. Both of them were wearing necklaces, bracelets, and headdresses made of flowers from Mrs. Wingate’s garden. Kim had a big white rose in her hair.
Jecca closed the book and went to the last one. In it, she was going to see Tristan as a man, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to.
She pushed the album aside, got up, and headed toward the stairs. She went up two steps before she turned around and ran back to the kitchen. She grabbed the album and took it into the conservatory. It seemed only fitting to look at it in Tristan’s room.
The last album showed more family photos. There was Tristan at his college graduation standing by a man who could only be his father. They were a perfectly matched pair, so much so that she knew she was seeing Tristan in his fifties.
She hesitated at turning the page. Did she want to see Tristan as he was now? But she knew that seeing a photo of someone was a lot different from seeing him in person.
Slowly, she turned the pages and watched him go from about eighteen to his current thirty-four years old. He was truly and deeply handsome. In his younger years he looked like one of the models that appeared on billboards in New York. His face and body—which she saw in the several photos of him at a beach—could sell any product to any female.
But what Jecca liked was past his outside form. There was a snapshot of Tristan in what looked to be Africa, another in South America.
They hadn’t been taken with Mrs. Wingate’s excellent camera, but with a cheap one that gave a blurred image. It looked like he’d sent them to her, as on the bottom of one he’d written, MISS ALL OF YOU. The second one said THE KIDS LOVE THE TOYS! THANK YOU.
There was a photo of several people in front of what looked to be his office in Edilean. They were drinking champagne
and laughing. TRISTAN GETS HIS OWN OFFICE AT LAST was written beside the picture.
