The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

But the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are public. Anybody can stand on them.

And Mrs. Hollis had planned a class photograph there at eight o’clock in the morning for twenty-two years, and she was the one in charge of it.

She clapped her hands twice, the way she does in class. “All right, eighth grade. Photograph. Everybody on the steps, tall kids in the back. Let’s go.”

Then she turned to Avery. “Miss Briggs. Front row. Middle.”

Avery just stood there. “Mrs. Hollis, I’m not on the trip. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“You earned this trip four summers ago, young lady,” Mrs. Hollis said, and her voice was not quite steady. “I’m the one who decides who’s in my class photograph. Front row. Middle.”

So Avery went. Emily and Kaylee each took one of her arms and walked her down to the front row like she was a bride, and the other kids shuffled and squeezed until there was a space for her right in the middle.

Before Mrs. Hollis took the class picture, she asked a tourist to take one of me and Avery together, right there on the steps, with the whole class bunched up behind us.

I put my arm around my daughter. Behind us the kids were all waving and yelling her name, and Mrs. Hollis stood among them with one hand up, beside the two mothers and the father who had come along as chaperones.

Then I stepped out of the way, and Mrs. Hollis took the real one.

Twenty-nine kids in navy shirts on the white steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in the sun, and my daughter in the middle of the front row with the biggest smile I have ever seen on her face.

Afterward, while the kids were going up to see the statue, Mrs. Hollis came over and stood beside me and looked down at the reflecting pool for a while without saying anything.

“I send the class photograph to every parent on the trip list tonight,” she said finally. “I have every year since the first one. Avery’s family is still on my list. I never took you off it.”

She looked at me over the top of her glasses. “That includes Kevin, you know. He’s on her contact card. He signed the permission slip in the fall.”

I thought about it. I could have asked her to leave him off. I could have kept that picture for myself and Avery and let Kevin go on thinking he had been right about statues and farm kids.

“Send it to him,” I said. “He should see it.”

Mrs. Hollis nodded like that was the answer she had hoped for. Then she put her hand on my arm, just for a second, and went to find her class.

We did not follow the class after that. I want to be clear about that, too. They went one way on their bus, and we went the other way on foot, and that was how it should be.

Every so often her phone buzzed. Emily and Kaylee were texting her pictures from wherever the bus had taken them, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, a dinner at some restaurant with a long table.

“Wish you were with us,” Emily wrote. “But you were with us, kind of.” Avery showed me that one twice.

That night at twenty to ten, back in the motel, I was lying on the bed with the television on low, and Avery was in the shower singing a song I did not know. My phone lit up on the nightstand. It was Kevin.