The Shoebox My Father Carried In

They were the square kind, with the white border. I picked up the top one. It showed our old kitchen window from the outside, the white frame, my mother’s red geranium on the sill. Through the glass you could see a very small girl in a high chair with frosting on both hands, and my mother behind her, laughing.

I turned it over. On the back, in carpenter’s pencil, in the square printing I knew from every feed bill of my childhood, it said: Laura. 2.

I picked up the next one. Same window. Same geranium, or its granddaughter. A little girl kneeling up on a kitchen chair, blowing at three candles. Laura. 3.

“I was coming up from the garden,” Leonard said. “The first one. It was your birthday and your mother had you at the table, and I saw the two of you through the glass. I hadn’t been married to her but a month. And I thought, there. That’s what I’m supposed to keep. I went and got the camera out of the truck.”

I kept turning them over. Laura. 6. Laura. 7. A gap in my front teeth. A cast on my arm the year I fell out of the hayloft.

“After that it was a habit. I’d go out every year and take the one picture through the window. Then you got older, and you wouldn’t have let me take one any other way.”

Laura. 13. I was not smiling in that one. I was looking at the cake as if it had said something to me.

Laura. 16. That was the year we lost my mother, in April. In the picture there was no one behind me. There was a white bakery cake on the table, and I was sitting in front of it with my chin in my hand.

“That cake,” I said. “There was a cake on the table every year after Mama died. No card. Nothing with it. I thought Doris left them.”

“I told her to let you think so,” he said.

“I’d have let you think I hung the moon, honey, if he’d asked me to,” Doris said. “I watched that road for eighteen years. I was not about to quit over a cake.”

The last photograph was Laura. 18. I was standing up in that one, not sitting. There was no cake in front of me because I had not waited for it. You could see my suitcase on the floor by the door.

There were seventeen of those pictures. Seventeen birthdays, every one taken by a man standing in the flower bed looking in at his own kitchen.

I laid them down in a row on the paper tablecloth, in order. It took the length of the picnic table.

For a while I could not say anything. Then I said the only thing I wanted to know.

“So you weren’t ashamed of me.”

His whole face came apart.

“Ashamed of you,” he said. “Lord, Laura. I was ashamed of me. Every time I shut that truck door.”

That was when my sister made a noise I had never heard out of her, and I remembered she was there.

Jenny was standing just where he had left her, in the middle of the grass. Jeff had a hand on her elbow. She shook it off.

“So that was it,” she said. “All of it. Every fair.”

“Jenny,” Leonard said.

“I was the one people were supposed to see.” Her voice was thin and careful. “That’s what you just said. You needed a little girl on your shoulders so nobody would ask about the other one.”