The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

Printing

I made Tamsin a whole box. I printed the best forty, eight by ten, on good fiber paper, and twenty wallet size of the laugh, because she said she wanted wallets, and Package B had wallets.

It took me most of a week. I ruined a few. My eyes are not what they were, and the safelight is dimmer than I remember.

When I had them all dried and flattened under the big dictionary, I put them in an old photo paper box with a rubber band around it, and I wrote her name on the lid.

Then I printed one more of the laugh, eight by ten, by itself, and put it in a manila envelope.

I did not know yet exactly what I was going to do with it. That is not true. I knew. I just did not know if I had the nerve.

The box

Tamsin came by Monday afternoon, before her shift at the drive-in. She had on her work shirt, the red one with her name stitched on it, and she smelled like fry oil and cherry syrup.

I handed her the box at the kitchen table and went to the counter to make coffee, so she would not have to look at me while she opened it.

It was quiet for a long time.

When I finally turned around, she was holding the laugh in both hands, with the other prints fanned out all over my kitchen table, and she was crying without making any sound.

“That’s me,” she said.

“That’s you,” I said.

“I look,” she said, and stopped, and tried again. “I look like somebody.”

I sat down across from her and I did not say anything, because there was nothing I could say that was better than what she had just said.

She went through every single print. She held some of them up to the window. She laughed at the stiff ones from the first roll and said she looked like she was waiting for a shot at the doctor.

“Grandpa,” she said, “what do I owe you?”

“You owe me a cherry limeade,” I said. “Large. And you owe me the program. Two years. You finish it.”

She came around the table and hugged me so hard my reading glasses went crooked.

The paper

The county weekly comes out on Thursday. It goes to the printer Wednesday afternoon. I know that schedule better than I know my own birthday.

So Tuesday morning I put on a clean shirt and my cardigan and my flat cap, and I drove downtown with that manila envelope on the seat beside me.

Arden runs the paper now. She is in her forties. She came to work there at twenty-two, straight out of college over in Warrensburg, and the old editor handed her to me and told me to teach her to shoot.

She could not hold a camera still to save her life. Her first ballgame, every picture was a blur. I took her out to the river every Saturday that whole summer and made her shoot herons until her hands were steady.

Now she writes the stories and shoots half the pictures and sells the ads and answers the phone. That is what it takes to run a weekly anymore.

She was at her desk by the front window when I came in. She stood up and hugged me, and asked after my knees, and asked if I wanted coffee.

“I brought you something,” I said, and I handed her the envelope.