The Dripping Photo on Her Hallway Wall

I went early, before anybody else was up. I found ours. I scrolled through thirty-one pictures of my parents and my daughter laughing in the sun, and every one of them was lovely, and I picked the best one for Mom and ordered a big print.

And then I got to the end. The last few shots, after Dad called everybody in.

There was Christine. Standing on the end. Claire’s wet arm around her waist. Head thrown back, eyes shut, laughing so hard you could almost hear it through the picture. Milo beside her, looking at her and not at the camera. Perry making a face. Dad grinning. Mom with her hand on Claire’s soaking shoulder.

It was the best picture of the whole set, and Christine was in the middle of it.

I ordered one more print, an eight by ten, and a plain black frame from the rack by the counter. Thirty-four dollars. Then I took it back up to the pool deck in a paper bag, sat on the lounge chair where my mother had said the wrong thing, and wrote on the back of the cardboard.

I wrote it four times on my phone first, trying to get it right. I took most of it out. What was left was short.

Claire found me there. She had her hair up in a towel and she was eating a banana.

“What’s that?”

I showed her.

She looked at the picture for a long time. Then she said, “She was really mean, Mom.”

“I know she was.”

“Like. That was really not okay. I could have hit my head.”

“I know, baby.”

“But I also kind of get it?” She sat down on the end of my chair. “You know what she said to me Sunday? When you were all at the show? She said she was glad she had a niece to go to the buffet with, because the rest of the family eats like they’re in a hurry to get back to work.”

I laughed in spite of myself, because we do.

“She was nice to me all week, Mom. She asked me about school. She asked me what I wanted to do. Nobody else asks me that, because everybody thinks they already know.”

I put my arm around her. She smelled like sunscreen and chlorine.

“Are you still mad about your dress?” I asked.

She thought about it. “I was. Kind of.” She shrugged. “But it’s a better picture this way. Grandpa was right. Nobody’s going to remember a dry one.”

St. Thomas came and went. Dad bought Mom a little gold charm of a sea turtle at a shop by the dock and fastened it on her bracelet right there on the sidewalk, in the heat, while she stood still as a girl and let him.

I watched them from across the street and I had to turn and pretend to look at T-shirts.

That is the part of the trip I think about at night, if I want to fall asleep happy. Not the pool. Not the frame. My father’s big farmer hands, which have fixed a hundred engines and pulled a hundred calves, fumbling with a tiny clasp in the hot sun because his wife of fifty years wanted a sea turtle.

Christine came to me that afternoon. Not to the room. She found me up on the open deck, by the rail where Milo and I had talked, with the island going small behind us.

She stood a few feet away with her arms crossed. She had her sunglasses on, so I could not see her eyes.