In an artsy-fartsy kind of way,' he said.

'What?' Grace studied his face, as always, craving his approval. 'I tried the palmetto fronds and, before that, a basket of seashells, and then some green mangoes, but I think the tomatoes work best, don't you?' 'Is that for tomorrow's ‘Friday Favorites' post?' he asked. 'Very pretty,' a voice breathed in her ear.īen rested a hand lightly on her shoulder and studied the vignette. Now, she zoomed out, leaving the tomatoes as red blurs, so that the old ironstone platters were in focus, their age-crazed crackles and brown spots coming into sharp relief. She adjusted the focus so the pale gel-covered seeds were in the foreground. She inhaled and clicked the trigger on her motor-driven shutter. She grabbed a knife from the sideboard and sawed one of the tomatoes in half, squeezing it slightly, until seeds and juices dribbled out onto the tabletop. Maybe, if she placed the container on its side, with the tomatoes spilling out? Yes. The vibrant color was a good contrast against the nubby linen of the runner, and she loved the lumpy forms and brilliant green and yellow stripes on some of the irregularly shaped fruits. Grace replaced the palmettos with a cardboard carton of lush red heirloom tomatoes. She'd arranged them in a mottled, barnacle-crusted pale aqua bottle she'd plucked from a pile of random junk at the flea market the weekend before. The builder's Web site referred to it as a motor court. She'd cut three small palmetto fronds from the newly landscaped driveway … No, she corrected herself. The look she was going for was spare.Įdit, edit, edit, she thought, nodding almost imperceptibly. Should she add knives? Maybe spoons? She thought not. She replaced the oversized sterling forks, tines pointed down, at the edge of the platters. With her right hand, she made a minute adjustment to one of the two deliberately mismatched white ironstone platters she'd placed on a rumpled-but not wrinkled-antique French grain-sack table runner. She'd polished the old pine table to a dull sheen, and the available light streaming in from the dining room window glinted off the worn boards. She made a conscious effort to smooth the burgeoning wrinkles in her forehead, then concentrated anew on her composition. She peered through the lens finder of her Nikon D7000 and frowned, but only for a moment, because, as Ben had told her countless times, a frown was forever. She certainly would have packed more underwear and a decent bra, not to mention moisturizer and her iPhone charger.īut as far as Grace knew, she was just doing her job, writing and photographing Gracenotes, a blog designed to make her own lifestyle look so glamorous, enticing, and delicious it made perfectly normal women (and gay men) want to rip up the script for their own lives and rebuild one exactly like hers. If Grace Stanton had known the world as she knew it was going to end that uneventful evening in May, she might have been better prepared.

Ladies night book