The Shoebox My Father Carried In

Our old kitchen window had wavy glass, and in the afternoon it threw back the yard like a pond. In the lower corner of the picture, over the top of the geranium, you could make out the reflection of a man in a seed cap with a camera held up to his face. And down beside his leg, hanging on to his belt loop with one hand, was a very small girl in a yellow sundress.

“That’s me,” Jenny said.

“You’re in six of them. I looked while he was talking. You’re in the window every year from four to nine.”

“I remember this.” Her voice had gone soft and strange. “He’d say, come on, Jenny Wren, let’s go take a picture of the birds. And we’d stand in Mama’s flowers and he’d point the camera at the house. He’d say, don’t wave, now. You’ll scare them.”

“He took you with him,” I said. “To the one thing he never showed another soul. He didn’t have to. Nobody was watching the flower bed.”

She looked at that picture for a long time.

“He never said a word against you,” she said at last. “I want you to know that. Not once, in all those trucks. I made up every bit of it. If I asked why you couldn’t come, he’d just say, your sister’s needed at home. And then he’d buy a bag of those cinnamon almonds at the gate, every year, and put it in the glove box and not open it.”

I had to wait a moment.

“There was a bag of cinnamon almonds on my pillow,” I said. “Every August. I thought it was Mama.”

Jenny started to cry in earnest then, and so did I. I put my arm around her. I cannot remember another time I did that.

“I’m sorry,” she said into my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Laura.”

“I know it.”

“Do you hate me?”

“No,” I said. “I was getting ready to. I think I’m going to skip it.”

She laughed, a real one, wet and startled.

“Come back in,” I said. “Amy made that cake from scratch and she’ll be watching to see who eats it.”

When we came through the gate, my yard was still quiet, but it was a different quiet. Brenda was pouring tea. Pastor Neil was sitting on the bench next to Leonard with a hand on his back, not saying anything.

Amy had all seventeen pictures stacked up neatly again. She was holding the shoebox on her lap.

“Mom,” she said. “Grandpa says you fell out of a hayloft.”

“I did.”

“He says you didn’t cry. He says you walked all the way to the house holding your arm and asked for a dish towel.”

I looked at him. He was looking at his knees.

“He would know,” I said.

Jenny went straight to him. She crouched down in front of the bench, right there in the grass in her nice slacks, and put the photograph on his knee and pointed at the corner of it. I did not hear what she said. I saw him put his hand on top of her head, the way you would with a child.

Then he looked up and found me, and he started to get to his feet.

“I’ll be going,” he said. “I’ve had my say. I’ve took up enough of your day.”

He put his cap on. He reached for the string to tie the box back up and remembered it was not his to tie, and his hand just stopped there over the table.