The Rival's Rival

*Holding still,* Julian says, more to himself than the street, and presses the shutter release. He counts to twelve in his head, the way he always does when the light is this thin. It is *still March, still stingy with its warmth.* The commission is from the merchants' association: twelve plates of twelve storefronts on Meeting Street, to hang in the new municipal building. *Fifty dollars and a mention in the News and Courier if they liked the work.* Kincaid's Dry Goods is number four. A pickle barrel sits exactly where Julian needs the sidewalk to be empty, roped to the corner of an old canvas awning, and the man who comes out of the shop with a crate of oranges and flour dusted to his elbows will not move it. *It's holding the awning.* *It's holding my shot.* Julian cannot afford to lose this job. His sister Rosalind is at the Pinckney Sanatorium, her bill is due in two weeks, and the portrait work he does there is paid in trade, meals and a private room, not cash. Hollis Kincaid cannot afford much either. He works his father's counter, and he paints watercolours nobody is supposed to know about, one of which has been hanging in the shop's display window for three weeks because he could not quite make himself keep hiding it. What begins over a barrel becomes low tide at the marsh, a thunderstorm at Shem Creek, a commission for the Saint Cecilia Ball, and a photograph pressed into Hollis's hands with the words *this is what I see when I look at you.* It also draws Aldous Kincaid, who sits on the association board, who has already put a newer photographer in front of Julian for the society work, and who says it to his face: *I've known since you set foot in my store and couldn't stop staring at my son.* Julian has been in Charleston six months. He has been working with a camera for twelve years. And the city has a precedent for men like him, which everyone knows by name: Tom served six months in the county jail, and when he got out he left Charleston on the first train north. A historical romance between two men, about glass plates and watercolours, a sick sister, a rival with ambition and a father with a private detective, ending a long way north of where it started. The romance is closed-door.