Just One Look Read Online Free PDF Page A

the necessity and even advantages of computer graphics and the World Wide Web. There was a site that featured her work, how to buy it, how to commission a portrait. At first, this had hit her as too much like shilling, but as Farley, her agent, reminded her, Michelangelo painted for money and on commission. So did Da Vinci and Raphael and pretty much every great artist the world has ever known. Who was she to be above it?
    Grace scanned in her three favorite apple-picking photos for safekeeping and then, more on a whim than anything else, she decided to scan in the strange photograph too. That done, she started bathing the children. Emma went first. She was just getting out of the tub when Grace heard his keys jangle in the back door.
    “Hey,” Jack called up in a whisper. “Any hot love monkeys up there waiting for their stud muffin?”
    “Children,” she said. “Children are still awake.”
    “Oh.”
    “Care to join us?”
    Jack bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The house shook from the onslaught. He was a big man, six-two, two-ten. She loved the substance of him sleeping beside her, the rise and fall of his chest, the manly smell of him, the soft hairs on his body, the way his arm snaked around her during the night, the feeling of not only intimacy but safety. He made her feel small and protected, and maybe it was un-PC, but she liked that.
    Emma said, “Hi, Daddy.”
    “Hey, Kitten, how was school?”
    “Good.”
    “Still have a crush on that Tony boy?”
    “Eeuw!”
    Satisfied with the reaction, Jack kissed Grace on the cheek. Max came out of his room, stark naked.
    “Ready for your bath, mah man?” Jack asked.
    “Ready,” Max said.
    They high-fived. Jack scooped Max up in a sea of giggles. Grace helped Emma get in her pajamas. Laughter spilled from the bath. Jack was singing a rhyming song with Max where some girl named Jenny Jenkins couldn’t decide what color to wear. Jack would start off with the color and Max filled in the rhyme line. Right now they were singing that Jenny Jenkins couldn’t wear “yellow” because she’d look like a “fellow.” Then they both cracked up anew. They did pretty much the same rhymes every night. And they laughed their asses off over them every night.
    Jack toweled Max off, got him into his pajamas, and put him to bed. He read two chapters of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. Max listened to every word, totally riveted. Emma was old enough to read by herself. She lay in her bed, devouring the latest tale of the Baudelaire orphans from Lemony Snicket. Grace sat with her and sketched for half an hour. This was her favorite time of the day-working in silence in the same room as her eldest child.
    When Jack finished, Max begged for just one more page. Jack stayed firm. It was getting late, he said. Max grudgingly acquiesced. They talked for another moment or two about Charlie’s impending visit to Willy Wonka’s factory. Grace listened in.
    Roald Dahl, both her men agreed, totally rocked.
    Jack turned down the lights-they had a dimmer switch because Max didn’t like complete darkness-and then he entered into Emma’s room. He bent down to give Emma a kiss good night. Emma, a total Daddy’s Girl, reached up, grabbed his neck, and wouldn’t let him go. Jack melted at Emma’s nightly technique for both showing affection and stalling going to sleep.
    “Anything new for the journal?” Jack asked.
    Emma nodded. Her backpack was next to her bed. She dug through it and produced her school journal. She turned the pages and handed it to her father.
    “We’re doing poetry,” Emma said. “I started one today.”
    “Cool. Want to read it?”
    Emma’s face was aglow. So was Jack’s. She cleared her throat and began:
    “Basketball, basketball,
    Why are you so round?
    So perfectly bumpy,
    So amazingly brown.
    Tennis ball, tennis ball,
    Why are you so fizzy,
    When you’re hit with a racket,
    Do you feel kind of dizzy?”
    Grace watched the scene from