SHE HAS A THREE-DAY wait before Jefferson Eads returns. She's been on the phone with Bonnie and has left messages for Jim Ed, who's out on the road. Bonnie is mildly interested, though when Maxine describes the filmmaker as a nice young man, Bonnie's thinking grad school or maybe even a little older. Bonnie doesn't volunteer to come down; it's midsummer, the height of gardening season.
Jefferson Eads is all business when he returns, no chitchat—he doesn't want to sit and have any tea with her, though he does eat a couple of the cookies. Maxine's a little disappointed by how antisocial he is—how driven, almost brusque—but she quickly adapts her mood to his: business.
He has a little notepad on which he's sketched various scenes—places he wants her to be, things he wants her to be doing. She's not a gardener, but he wants footage of her digging a hole in the backyard, and is almost cross with her when he discovers that she doesn't even own a shovel. He won't take no for an answer, and he leaves her there in the kitchen with her tea and a plateful of cookies and hurries next door to the neighbors, whose names Maxine can't quite remember, and returns shortly with the prop he needs.
He works her hard that morning, using up all the good in her and then some, positioning her just so against the morning light, then repositioning her, and yet again: forcing her to walk back and forth, doing the same minor take over and over again, neither praising nor criticizing her, simply directing her to repeat the same thing with only the most minor of variations, and with Maxine wearing down quickly.
None of this is what I signed on for, she thinks. Be careful what you ask for. But time and again she answers the bell and does whatever he asks with as much energy as she can bring.
"Why would an old woman with a walker be out digging a hole?" she asks him at one point—the late-morning sun is above the trees, beating down hard, stirring the floaters in her vision—and Jefferson Eads does not have an answer, but pushes her to do it again, though he gives her a break, lets her hobble over to the shade and sit down in a folding chair to catch her breath while he pans the camera all around the yard, filming what now looks like a battlefield for gophers.
"This was not in my life," she says, and he sighs and tells her that it's important to him, it's what the film books call metaphor, though when she asks him for what, he purses his lips and says, "We'll have to see."
"It's my life," she says, "and my movie, I deserve to know."
Jefferson Eads shrugs and tells her he can't explain it, that he works by instinct. "You're hungry," he says, "you're desperate. You're clawing at the earth. That's all I know. That's all I need to know."
Sensing that he's losing her—and he's cross about this, too—he calls it a day, tells her she can go back inside and have a glass of water.
And once inside, his demeanor changes, as if he's suddenly sated. He becomes a young boy again rather than a tyrant, and where previously he was interested in only the camera and the cold technical impassivity of light and sound, he is now interested in her life again. The camera's rolling again—the camera's always rolling—but he's not being so dictatorial; he's just a boy again, curious about the treasure of her life, and is drawn to her, like so many before him.
All she ever had to do was wait: everything came to her, always, and she had only to wish for something and it would eventually be given to her. The only flaw in the miracle was that it was never enough.