The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

The others

The week after that, the phone in my kitchen started ringing. It has not rung that much since I retired.

The first one was the mother of Tamsin’s best friend from band, the girl whose dad was laid off since June. She asked, very carefully, if I would ever consider taking her daughter’s senior pictures, and how much I would charge.

“Can she be on the square Saturday at nine?” I said.

“How much, Mr. Rourke?”

“A roll of film,” I said. “And a cherry limeade. Tamsin will tell her what kind.”

Then there was a boy from the football team whose family farms out by Blackburn. Then two sisters who were twins. Then a girl whose grandmother had raised her and wanted a picture of the two of them together on the steps.

I have shot eleven of them now. Every Saturday morning that it is not raining, I am on the courthouse square with the old Nikon and my bad knees, and Tamsin comes along before her shift to hold the reflector and tell them about the fountain and the corn dog.

That story works every time. Lacey says she will never forgive either of us.

I had to order more Tri-X. It costs a good deal more than it used to. Arden put a little notice in the paper, and people from church started leaving rolls of film in my mailbox with no note. I do not know who. I do not ask.

The visor

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I went over to my daughter’s for dinner after church. Kirby was out in the driveway with the hood of his truck up, changing the air filter, and I went over to hand him tools the way men do.

When he leaned in under the hood, I looked through the open driver’s side window.

There, clipped to the sun visor over the steering wheel, was a small wooden frame, the cheap kind they sell at the dollar store. Inside it was one of the wallet prints of the laugh.

“She gave me that,” Kirby said, without coming out from under the hood. He had seen me looking. “Put it there herself. Said a man ought to have at least one picture in his truck.”

“That’s a good place for it,” I said.

“I look at it every morning when I flip the visor down,” he said. “Going east into the sun. Every single morning.”

He came out from under the hood and wiped his hands on a rag and looked at me, and his eyes were wet, and he did not try to hide it.

“Your girl did that,” he said. “Not me. I don’t deserve it.”

“She thinks you do,” I said. “That’s the thing about her.”

The last frame

I would like to tell you that was the end of it, but it was not. The end was a week later.

It was a Saturday, a cold bright one, the first day of December. I was on the square with the twin sisters, finishing up, and my knees were telling me the season was about done.

A truck pulled up at the curb on the east side of the square. Kirby got out. He had on a clean flannel shirt and his good jeans, and his hair was combed wet, the way men comb it for church.

He walked across the lawn through the last of the maple leaves and stopped at the bottom of the courthouse steps. He stood there with his hands in his pockets like he was waiting to be called on.

I lowered the camera.

“Emmett,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “I’ve never had my picture taken. Not once in my life. I’m forty-five years old.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked up the stone steps, where Tamsin had sat in her mother’s jacket on the first cool morning of October, laughing.

“Would you take one of me too?”