Frames Per Second by Bill Eidson Read Free Book Online Page A

circumstances.
    It was a nauseating pill, but Ben knew he had to swallow it somehow. For the sake of the kids. For some semblance of a friendship with Andi. As for the Insider, he’d give it a little more time. His work with Peter was the best of his career and he saw no reason to let Kurt take that away, too.
    Ben shifted on the thwart, squirming to find some comfort on the hard wood, but he couldn’t. He felt out of sorts with the world. Not for the first time, he thought, How did I let this happen?
    Andi had been just twenty-one when they met. Good girl from an old Boston family who had long ago lost their money, but not their expectations.
    “Help her out,” said Jack Griswald, their editor from the Portland Press Herald. Ben, a veteran photojournalist of all of twenty-five himself, had taken her out on her first hard news assignment to cover an accident at a paper mill.
    A workman had been killed, a horrific accident where his jacket had caught in a roller press and he had been pulled in. The accident itself was too gruesome for the paper. Ben limited himself to reaction shots from co-workers, and the spokesman for the mill. Then they went to the workman’s home to talk to his widow. Absolute de rigueur in those days. Ben hated it himself, but when he looked over at the new reporter then, her face white, her fists clenched over her notebook, he thought he would have to conduct the interview himself.
    But she did her job as well as anyone could have expected. She talked quietly with the widow and learned about the workman, Jeff Kirkland, and listened to the woman’s grief, without ever asking that brutally cruel question so many reporters favored: “What are you feeling?”
    And in the car on the way back to the paper, Andi cried quietly, making no objection when Ben rested his hand on her shoulder. However, upstairs in the newsroom, she went back to her business, and wrote an article that was factual, but sensitively conveyed the loss of Kirkland to his wife and son.
    All very professional, and Ben respected that about her.
    On the side, she continued to help Dorothy Kirkland, first by helping her find a job, then with a follow-up article months later that brought in enough cash to establish a college trust fund for the Kirkland boy. For this, Andi gained the nickname “PollyAndi” from her peers. Griswald admonished her, saying that although the Kirkland articles had worked out, if she was to be a reporter, her role was not advocacy or charity.
    “For me, he’s wrong,” Andi said, looking over Ben’s photos one night. They were friends at that point. He thought she was interested in him, but couldn’t tell for sure. He, on the other hand, was hopelessly in love. He was feeling like a coward for not pursuing things further.
    She touched his prints, shots of children, of criminals, of accident victims. Shots of loneliness, of happiness, of loss, of serenity and euphoria.
    “You manage it, though,” she said. “You show your indignation, your respect, your compassion. It’s all here.”
    “I report first, though.”
    “It’s still filtered through your head. Just like I choose what to write, you choose what to shoot. It’s inevitable that we editorialize.”
    “That’s the challenge,” Ben agreed. “What I capture is not necessarily the whole reality, but the one I see. But I try to keep myself out of it.’’
    “Mmmm. I want my words to do some good and I have to go about it the direct way.” Her eyes met his. “As a matter of fact, I appreciate directness in most things. I like to know what people are feeling.’’
    “Uh-huh,” he said, feeling suddenly like he was about to jump out of a plane. “Seeing as you appreciate directness …”
    “Which I do,” she said, smiling.
    He told her how he felt about her. Stumbling a bit, but getting the words out.
    She took his hand and pulled it to her, kissing the back of his wrist, for the first time. He pulled her into his arms.
    They didn’t