The Last Good Day Read Online Free PDF

thirty-five, noticing that morning light was beginning to refract on the windows of Starbucks. She crouched down, wondering if it would be too corny to shoot from the exact same angle she used on the dilapidated exterior of her grandfather’s factory twenty-five years ago so she could juxtapose the images on the gallery wall.
    But then George was gone, and there was a whirlwind of movement outside the frame. She looked around to see several men scattering down the street like billiard balls, chased by a cop on a bicycle. A second cop followed, looking very much like an overgrown boy in a shiny plastic helmet, snug blue Lycra shorts, and a short-sleeved uniform shirt. He quickly rode ahead and cut off George and the other stragglers, using his bike as a roadblock. Lynn stayed in her crouch, clicking off shot after shot as if she was still working for the Daily News.
    “Hey, hey,” the cop called over to her. “What do you think you’re doing?”
    She kept shooting, finding it difficult to take orders seriously from a man in tight shorts and white socks.
    “Excuse me, miss. Will you please put that camera down?” She got a shot of him dismounting, hairy white-guy legs against a background of gleaming silver spokes.
    “What’s going on?” she asked, finally lowering the camera.
    “We need to talk to some of these gentlemen.”
    She saw George mutter something to the boy in the American-flag muscle shirt.
    “Is this some kind of INS roundup?”
    “No,” said the cop, whom she recognized as the same guy who checked her ID at the Total Fitness Gym on South Warren Avenue three afternoons a week. “They may have some information that could be helpful to us in an investigation.”
    “Oh.”
    She saw a white van with tinted windows rush past the corner on its way to the train station, and her heart did a little stutter as she registered the fact that it said “Office of the Westchester County Medical Examiner” on the side.
    “What happened?” she asked the cop. “Did somebody have a heart attack or something?”
    “Uhhhh, ma’am, we’re really not supposed to be giving out information like that.”
    She walked to the corner and looked down the block, seeing a couple of ME’s assistants in navy windbreakers jump out of the van by the station’s parking lot entrance.
    “Well, it looks like something is going on.”
    She started jogging toward the station, drawn on by the sight of the men throwing open the back of the van and readying it for a body, feeling the ineluctable pull of an image forming down the street.
    “Miss, they really don’t want people getting in the way,” the cop called after her. “Miss?”
    “Okay. Thank you! Bye!”
    She gave George a quick wave over her shoulder as she hurried on with her camera bag, knowing if she waited too long the picture would be gone. “Que le vaya bien.”
    All right, so this is life. No matter how minutely you plan, the shadow always moves. The light always shifts. The face always changes expression a quarter-second before you click the shutter.
    The cameras thumped against her chest as she ran across the street to the station. She used to be better at these little bursts of change. Okay, so she hadn’t meant to get pregnant at twenty-five, when her career as a photographer was just taking off and she was about to make the long leap from splash-and-splatters in the Daily News to a contract with the New York Times Magazine. Fine, she’d scaled back to occasional catalog work and freelance quickies so she could be with Hannah and then Clay and not have to endure the painful separations that torture other working moms. All right, once they got older, she’d meant to start hustling jobs again, but then things got complicated. So you learn to improvise and compromise. You move to the suburbs because it’s better to be close to Mom when she’s sick and cheaper than paying for private schools in the city. You learn to go with the flow, budget ambition, work