The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

“Then everybody in your class has money to burn,” Kirby said, and he did not look up from his plate when he said it.

My granddaughter Tamsin was standing at the end of the supper table with a folded price sheet in her hand. It was from the photo studio out by the highway, the one all the kids go to now.

“Package B is $180,” she said again, quieter this time. “It’s the one with the wallets. Everybody in my class is getting them, Kirby. Even my friend from band, and her dad’s been laid off since June.”

Kirby cut his pork chop into neat pieces the way he does everything. He is a foreman at the plant, and he runs his supper table about the way he runs a line.

“A hundred and eighty dollars,” he said, “so a photographer in town can put you on a hay bale and charge you for it. That’s money thrown away, Tamsin. On a girl who’s going to be working at the plant anyway.”

I was sitting right there. I had driven over that afternoon with a sack of Jonathan apples from the tree behind my house, and my daughter’s husband had asked me to stay for a plate.

I want to be honest about that. I was sitting right there, and for a second I did not say anything at all, because I was too surprised to find the words.

Tamsin did not argue. That is what got me. She folded that price sheet in half, and then in half again, until it was about the size of a matchbook.

“Okay,” she said.

She carried her plate to the sink, rinsed it, set it in the rack, and went down the hall to her room. The door closed so softly you could hardly hear it.

Kirby went on eating. After a minute he looked across at me, and I think he saw something on my face, because he set his fork down.

“You think I’m hard on her,” he said.

“I think she wants to be a vet tech,” I said. “Not a plant worker. She told me so at Easter. She’s been saving her drive-in money for the program over at the community college.”

“She can want whatever she wants,” Kirby said. “Wanting doesn’t pay a light bill. Neither does a picture.”

I looked at him a long time. Then I thanked him for supper, which was the decent thing to do, and I went out to my truck and sat in the driveway with the engine off.

The man at the table

I should tell you about Kirby Doss, because he is not a cartoon, and I would not be fair to him if I made him one.

He is 45 years old. He married my daughter Lacey when Tamsin was nine, and he has kept a roof over both of them and paid every bill on time for eight years. He has never raised a hand to anyone in that house.

He grew up out past Malta Bend in a rented house with a dirt floor in the back room. His mother cleaned motel rooms, and his father was gone more than he was home.

He told me once, at a Fourth of July cookout, that there is not one school picture of him anywhere in this world. Not kindergarten. Not his senior year. His mother never had the money for the envelope.

He said it like a joke that day. Nobody laughed, and he changed the subject to the price of diesel.

So that is his reason. He thinks school pictures and senior pictures and all of it is a business for rich kids, a way to take money off people who do not have it. He thinks he is protecting Tamsin from wanting things.

I understand his reason. It does not make what he said right. You do not tell a seventeen year old girl, at her own mother’s table, that she is not worth $180 because of where she is going to end up.