The Pictures in the Church Kitchen

And here is the line I carried around for a long time afterward.

“If I gave them to you,” Connie said, “he would only go over to your house to look at them.”

“So it had to be the trash,” I said.

“It had to be gone.”

I looked at the two taped boxes. “And Mother’s china.”

“I had a garage sale Saturday. It was in the paper. That set took up the whole hutch and it has not been out of it since I moved in. A lady from Utica gave me sixty dollars and she is coming with her husband’s pickup today.” Connie lifted her chin. “It is my house too, Amy. Pastor Greg stood right there in February and said so, in so many words.”

It was a service for twelve. Cream colored, with a thin platinum rim and a ring of tiny blue flowers. My folks got it place setting by place setting from every aunt and neighbor in Seward County in the summer of 1973, and my mother washed it by hand for fifty years because she did not trust a dishwasher with it.

Sixty dollars. Five dollars a place setting.

I did not raise my voice. I have my father’s temper, which is to say I go quiet and my hands get busy. I took out my phone and called him.

It rang six times and went to the voice that tells you the mailbox has not been set up. I called again. Six more.

Anybody who has had a man at a grain elevator in October knows why. My father ran the dump pit at the co-op for thirty-eight years, and every harvest since he retired they call him back, because nobody living can hear a bearing going bad over the roar of that leg the way Harold can. He wears ear plugs and a dust mask from six in the morning until the last truck is empty. His phone rides in the cup holder of his pickup, where the dust can’t get in it.

So I put the phone in my pocket, and before I did anything else I made her an offer. I want it on the record that I made it.

“Connie,” I said. “Come down here and help me carry these to my car. Just help me carry them. And when Dad asks, I will tell him you called me to come get them. That will be the whole story. I will never tell it any other way.”

She looked at me for what felt like a full minute.

Mrs. Tuttle said nothing. She told me later she was praying with her eyes open.

“I have paint drying,” Connie said.

She went inside and she shut the door. Not a slam. She just shut it, the way you close a door on a draft.

I stood there a second longer. Then Mrs. Tuttle said, “Well, Amy, I cannot lift, but I can count,” and that got me moving.

I backed the car up to the curb and put the seats down. The boxes were heavier than they looked, because every one of those pictures was under glass. I counted the frames as I went so I would know what I had. Thirty-one. Under them, in the bottom of the fourth box, was the shoebox of loose snapshots that had lived on the closet shelf, and three of the photo albums with the sticky pages.

Not the white one. Not the wedding album.