The Senior Pictures on the Courthouse Square

Lacey

My daughter called me at a quarter past two that afternoon. She had worked the night before and slept through the morning, and Kirby had left one of those papers folded on the kitchen table where she would see it when she got up.

“Daddy,” she said, and that is all she said for a while, because she was crying.

“I know, honey.”

“That’s my jacket,” she said. “That’s my old jean jacket. She looks just like me. She looks like Mom.”

“She does,” I said.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” she said. “Why didn’t she want pictures? I’d have found the money. I always find the money.”

So I told her. I told her what Kirby had said at the supper table, every word of it, because she was his wife and she had a right to know what was said to her daughter in her own house.

The line went quiet for a long time.

“Money thrown away,” Lacey said finally. “On a girl going to work at the plant.”

“That’s what he said.”

“I work at the plant, Daddy,” she said. “Is that what he thinks of me, too?”

I did not have an answer for that. I told her to talk to him, in the daylight, not at supper and not in front of Tamsin. I told her he had bought three copies. I told her what he said about never having a picture of his own.

In the yard

I do not know everything that was said between my daughter and her husband that weekend. It is not my business, and Lacey has never been one to tell it all.

But I know this much, because Tamsin told me.

Saturday afternoon, Lacey and Kirby were out in the side yard raking leaves. Tamsin was home before her shift. Kirby put down his rake and came in the back door and knocked on her bedroom door, which he had never done before. He usually just called through it.

He stood in her doorway with his cap in his hands.

“I was wrong,” he told her. “What I said at supper. About the pictures, and about the plant. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. You’re not going to the plant. You’re going to that program, and I’ll drive you myself the first day if your car won’t start.”

Tamsin said she did not know what to say, so she said okay. Then she said it was all right. Then she said thank you.

“It’s not all right,” Kirby said. “But it will be.”

And he went back out and picked up his rake.

I believe him. A man who says it in the daylight with his cap in his hands is usually telling the truth.