Chapter Text
“You must be Jack,” Joelle comes around the table where she’s been setting out supplies and extends a hand in greeting as Jack enters the room. “I’m Joelle Martin. Thank you so much for helping out today.”
Jack accepts her hand and shakes it. He’d expected someone slightly shorter from the photos he’s seen of Joelle with George and the team, but then realizes that, of course, almost anyone will look short next to a team of hockey players. In real life, she’s maybe an inch or two taller than George, and rounder, though the pile of braids on her head -- shot through with red and purple -- brings her nearly level with his chin. She has kind eyes.
“Jack,” he says in response, even though she’s already identified him, “I’m happy to be here. What do you need me to do?”
Jack hadn’t expected to spend Wednesday afternoon helping Joelle teach a group of six- and seven-year-olds at the Providence Athenaeum how to make pinhole cameras and develop photographs. But on Monday afternoon Georgia had telephoned him sounding somewhat harried.
“Jack? Is this a good time?”
“Fine,” Jack had affirmed, juggling his phone and the stack of books he had in his arm. She’d caught him just as he was leaving the Pawtucket public Library. He was expecting a call from Eric during his mid-afternoon break, the only reason he had the phone set to vibrate at all; he habitually kept it on silent. “What do you need?”
“I’ve noticed you're something of a photographer,” Georgia had said. “My wife, Joelle, is teaching a summer workshop for kids -- six- and seven-year-olds -- at the Providence Athenaeum and her co-instructor’s had a family emergency that took her out of state. Jo needs a second pair of hands and I thought of how good you’ve been with the kids on Saturday…?”
“Sure,” Jack had agreed.
He’d been a little surprised by how happy he is, actually, to be asked. Since running into Georgia and Emmy at the arena that day the family’s childcare fell through, he’s found himself thinking a lot about Georgia and her wife. He may even have gone hunting online for images from Falconer’s events, scanning the photographs for glimpses of Georgia and Joelle together, which were fairly easy to find -- even a few pictures with Georgia or Joelle with a baby Emmy strapped to their chests in one of those wrap things that he sees around. The last time he stopped by Georgia’s office to ask her a question, he’d noticed the family photograph sitting by her computer monitor, and the baby pictures pinned to the corkboard next to giant wall calendar where the team schedule for the year is mapped out. The juxtaposition makes something in his chest ache a little.
He’s been looking for clues, he realizes, about how possible it might be to do this. Not only be out to his teammates, but to be visibly part of a couple. To be visibly attached to a family that doesn’t look like the family his father had, the family that every other hockey player he’s ever known has had: the wife, the ex-wife, the girlfriend, the kids. He and Bitty don’t look like that, and neither to Georgia and Joelle. And while it’s true that Georgia isn’t herself a player -- Jack is under no illusions that his own public declaration would be near non-event the way Georgia’s hiring, marriage, maternity leave, and return to the team seem to have been -- there’s still something about the Martins that fascinates him.
“I’d be happy to help out,” he’d told Georgia on Monday as he walked out to his car in the library parking lot. “I mean, I’ve only ever taken the one class--”
Georgia had laughed, “Oh! Don’t worry about it. I mean, knowing your way around a camera will be a plus -- but they’re going to be building pinhole cameras and learning how to develop photographs from the negatives. There are twelve students enrolled and that’s just too many for Jo to handle by herself.”
“Sure,” Jack said again, as he reached the Honda dropped the stack of books on the hood so he could pull out his keys. “Where and when do you want me?”
“Mr. Z, can you help?” asks a tiny girl sporting a pair of round glasses with bright red frames. They’re making the pinhole cameras out of Quaker Oats cylinders and she’s struggling to tape the aperture flap over the hole they’d cut together in the lid. Jack puts his hand on the soon-to-be-camera so she can affix the tape in place, then looks around at the rest of his table as he does, to see whether any of the other six kids he’s been charged with need assistance. They’re all bent to their work. At the other table, Joelle is bent over to speak with a student, pointing to something on their cylinder and murmuring something before moving on to the next.
“Mr. Z?” Sarina, the girl next to him pipes up with another question. “I need to pee.”
Jack recalls the layout of the hall outside the room where they’re working. “It’s right down at the end of the hall that way,” -- he points -- “by the drinking fountain. Do you need help finding it?”
“I got it!” She pushes back from the table with her single hand and skips off down the hall to the bathroom while Jack turns to Ahmed, the quiet boy on his left.
“How’s your table doing?” Joelle asks, coming over to check on them. Her soft Southern accent is disconcertingly like Eric’s and Suzanne’s; all morning Jack has felt a slight vertigo at worlds’ colliding every time she speaks.
“I think we’re all ready?” Jack picks up his own pinhole camera box and pops open the lid. “We’ll put the photo paper in here?”
Joelle nods. “I’ve got that stack you helped me pre-cut in the dark room. We’ll have to help the kids put the film in three at a time -- the room is small -- so maybe if you can keep an eye on them out here? I’ll help them all get the cameras loaded and then we’ll go outside where the light is good.”
They get the kids’ cameras all set and then troop out onto the lawn where Joelle talks to the kids for a couple of minutes about composition before sending them off in pairs to take their photos on the front steps of the library.
“You’re from somewhere down south?” He asks, to make conversation while they wait the thirty seconds it will take for the kids to set up their shots, open the apertures, and sing the stanza of “Row, row, row your boat” they’ve been instructed to sing before closing it up again.
“I grew up in Atlanta,” Joelle tells him, which explains the accent. “I came up here to go to RISD and never left.”
“I have ... my friend Eric is from Georgia,” Jack says, “I thought your accent sounded familiar.”
Joelle laughs, “Yeah, it’s hard to take the South out of us Southerners, even if we never plan to move back!”
“You like it here?”
“I won’t lie, I didn’t plan to stay much beyond graduation but --” Joelle shrugs, “-- Georgia and I both have our work here, now. And we have to be careful about where we move, especially with Emmy. We’re married in Rhode Island but if we moved to Georgia, I wouldn’t be assured any parental rights when it comes to my own daughter.”
Jack shakes his head, “I hope that changes soon.”
Joelle looks at him, narrowly, tucking a braid that’s fallen loose back behind her ear. “Me too.”
Jack wonders what she’s thinking, and feels the sudden urge to blurt out something like I’m gay! or I’m actually dating my friend from Madison! How do people do this without sounding completely awkward? And, anyway, he promised Bitty he wouldn’t say anything about their relationship to people connected to the team until they’ve had a chance to talk.
“We sang the whole song! And Robbie stood still as a statue!” one of the kids informs them, running up with the camera clutched in her hands. “Can we develop it now?”
“Just you wait a minute for the others,” Joelle says. “Jack, maybe you could go stand over there and -- everyone who’s ready to go back inside, stand over there by Jack!” She raises her voice slightly, to call out to the students.
Jack moves a few feet to his left and is soon joined by a knot of kids clutching their Quaker Oats box cameras.
“Hey,” he says, for something they can do while waiting for the rest of the group “Shall we take a picture with my camera?” He pulls out his phone and thumbs open the screen. The kids cluster around him as he crouches down, crowding in and mugging for the camera as he holds it out in front of them. His arm is long, but he can still only get a crowded frame, showing himself and about five small faces with the gap-toothed smiles of kids starting to lose their baby teeth.
He remembers, suddenly, the cameras of sports journalists being shoved in his face at their age. Of the way he trained himself not to smile with his mouth open once his teeth started falling out because he was embarrassed by way his grown-up teeth didn’t look like they fit in his mouth. There are a lot of family portraits from that era where Bob and Alicia are smiling like movie stars and between them stands a small, round-faced child wearing glasses slightly too big for his face and a faint frown.
He grins, to match the kids around him, and snaps a few photos just as Joelle comes over with the final few stragglers to lead everyone back inside.
“Ready for the dark room?” She asks the kids, some of whom cheer in response. Jack rises to his feet and counts heads to make sure they have all twelve children before they head back through the front doors of the library.
Later, he’ll send the best photo to Bitty, and maybe his parents too. His mother was always saying how good he was with kids. It's something Jack’s never thought much about, because for him being with kids is mostly just a relief from spending time with grown-ups who demand so much more from him. The kids are happy with their box cameras and a few spontaneous selfies. None of the kids in this class seem to know what he does for a living. Joelle had, at his request, just introduced him as her helper for the day.
Maybe he’ll talk to her about doing another class like this, maybe with kids a little older -- he could take a group of kids out to Swan Point Cemetery to practice nature photography, maybe. Or out to those falls he’d gone to with Dev and Pogs.
Jack smiles to himself, and slips his phone back into his pocket thoughtfully.