"People say lots of things." She stepped back. "Come in before the cold gets out."
The apartment was small and very clean and almost empty. That was the first thing he noticed. A brown couch. A card table with two folding chairs. A television on a metal stand, a little Zenith, black and white, and he caught himself thinking that his father could have gotten her a better one for cheap. Cardboard moving boxes, still taped, stacked against one wall. On the boxes, in black marker, STUDIO — NEGS 1946–55. STUDIO — NEGS 1956–65. STUDIO — NEGS 1966–83.
"You're moving?" he said.
"I moved. In March. I just haven't finished arriving." She went into the tiny kitchen and came back with two jelly glasses of tea with ice cubes rattling in them. "My husband passed three years ago. I stayed in the house in Bisbee as long as I could stand it, and then I couldn't. My sister lived here. Lived. She passed at Easter. So now it's just me and the boxes, and the boxes don't talk much." She sat down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her. "Sit. Drink. You look like you're about to bolt."
He sat. He drank. The tea was very sweet.
"What's a neg?" he asked.
She smiled, a real smile this time. "A negative. You know what a negative is?"
"The orange stuff you get back with your pictures. That you're supposed to keep and nobody keeps."
"That's right. Except that you're supposed to keep them. The negative is the real picture. The print is just a copy. You lose a print, you make another one. You lose the negative, it's gone." She nodded at the boxes. "My husband and I had a portrait studio on Main Street for thirty-seven years. Abbott Studio. Weddings, babies, graduations, men from the mine who'd been promoted and wanted to look like it. Every negative I ever shot is in those boxes. Every family in the Warren District, practically. And some of my own."
She set her glass down on the floor. She had brought something out from beside the couch cushion, he saw, and was holding it face down on her knee.
"I owe you this," she said. "You took it home by accident. I noticed it was missing when I got off the bus."
It was the Fourth of July picture. He had brought it with him, in a sandwich bag in his back pocket, to give back. He took it out now and held it up. "I have it," he said. "This one's yours. I was gonna—"
"No. That's not what I mean." She turned over the thing on her knee.
It was the same photograph. The same steep street, the same bunting, the same man with the cigarette and woman in sunglasses and girl in shorts. But this one was crisper, newer, the paper bright white. And there was no hole.
The boy in the striped T-shirt was there. Fifteen, maybe. All elbows. Holding the sparkler, which was still burning in this one, a fuzzy white star at the end of the wire. He was laughing at something off to the side of the camera, his head turned, his ears sticking out, his hair standing straight up at the crown.