The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

Saturday

That Saturday was the first cool morning of October. You know the kind. The sky was clear and hard blue, and you could see your breath for the first hour after sunup.

I got to the square early. The maples along the courthouse lawn had turned overnight, or it seemed that way, orange from top to bottom, and the leaves were starting to come down on the sidewalk.

I walked all the way around the building twice, looking at the light the way I used to. On a clear fall morning, the east steps get the best of it until about eleven.

The courthouse in Marshall is an old brick building with stone steps worn down in the middle from a hundred years of people going in to pay their taxes and get married and argue with the county.

At ten minutes to nine, Tamsin came walking up from where she had parked on the side street. She had on a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and over the top of it, her mother’s old jean jacket.

I knew that jacket the second I saw it. Lacey wore it all through high school. She wore it to ballgames and to the fair and to the drive-in, and she wore it the day she got her driver’s license.

It had faded nearly white at the elbows, and it was too big on Tamsin through the shoulders. The cuffs came down to her wrists.

“I found it in the hall closet,” she said. “Mom was asleep. She got in at seven. Is it okay? I didn’t know what else.”

“It’s perfect,” I said, and I meant it, and I had to look down at the camera for a minute to get my face straight.