The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

The rack

He had his plant jacket on and his thermos in his hand. He stops there every morning on his way in to the day shift, for a pack of cigarettes and a refill on his thermos.

He said good morning to Clement. He did not see me yet, back by the coffee machine, behind the bread rack.

Then he stopped at the newspaper rack, the way you stop when something catches the corner of your eye.

He picked up a paper.

There it was, across the top of the front page, five columns wide. Tamsin on the stone steps of the courthouse, in her mother’s jacket, laughing, with the maples behind her.

Under it, the headline said “Class of 2027,” and under that, the list. Every senior at the high school, in alphabetical order. Arden had run it in a box right beside the picture.

Kirby stood there a long time. He did not move. Clement watched him from behind the counter, and the two old boys at the window table stopped talking.

“That’s your girl, isn’t it, Kirby?” Clement said. “Fine looking picture. Best I’ve seen in that paper in years.”

Kirby did not answer. He just kept looking.

Then he turned around and saw me by the coffee.

What he said

I want to tell you that I said something wise. I did not. I just stood there with my coffee and let him look at me.

He came back to where I was, between the bread rack and the coffee, and stood close enough that the old boys at the table could not hear us.

“When did you take this,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“Saturday before last,” I said. “On the square. I had some film in the icebox.”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“She asked me not to,” I said. “She asked me not to tell her mother, either, because her mother would have paid the $180 and gone short on the light bill. And she asked me not to pay for the studio, because she said you’d hold it over Lacey.”

That was hard for him to hear. I watched it land.

I could have said more. There was a part of me that wanted to. I wanted to say: you told her she was not worth it, and there she is on the front page, and everybody in the county is going to see her.

I did not say it. I am seventy-one years old, and I have learned that you do not need to say the thing when the thing is already sitting there in a man’s hands.

Kirby looked down at the paper again. His thumb was right next to her face.

“I never had one,” he said. “Not one picture. Not ever.”

“I know,” I said. “You told me once.”

“I thought,” he said, and stopped. He shook his head. “I don’t know what I thought.”

He stood there a little longer. Then he went back to the rack and picked up two more copies, and carried all three of them to the counter, and set them down in front of Clement.

“Three,” he said, and put his money down, and forgot his cigarettes.

Clement rang him up and did not say one word, which I have always loved him for.

Kirby walked out with those three papers under his arm. He did not look back. Through the window I watched him stop by his truck and open the door, and then just stand there in the morning sun, reading it again.