Carter's mouth went dry.
"How'd you do that?"
"My husband cut the prints," she said. "Every one he could find. One night in 1966 he went through every album in the house with the big trimming shears from the studio. Every album, every frame, every snapshot in every drawer. He took our son's face out of every one of them and he burned the pieces in the barbecue, and then he took the scratch awl from his toolbox and he took our son's name off the backs. I watched him do it. I stood in the kitchen and watched him." She said it all very evenly, as if she were reading it off the back of a picture. "What he didn't do was go down to the studio and pull the negatives. I don't think it ever occurred to him. Walt was a mine man before he was a photographer. He married into it. To him the picture was the print. He never did understand that the print is only a copy."
She took the restored photograph and laid it gently on the card table, beside the cut one.
"I've been printing them again," she said. "Since March. I turned the bathroom into a darkroom. You can't stand up in it without hitting your head on the enlarger, but it does. Every hole he made, I've been filling back in. One at a time. I was taking the old ones to Desert Camera to have copies made of the backs, the handwriting, because that's the part I can't print again." She looked at him. "And then the wind."
He looked at the two pictures side by side. The hole and the face. The face and the hole.
"Why'd he do it?" Carter asked. "Your husband. Why'd he cut him out?"
She was quiet a long time. Outside the window the sky was going purple-gray over the Catalinas. Three o'clock. The rain was coming.
"Because our son did something Walt couldn't forgive," she said. "And because I didn't stop him. Either one of them." She folded her hands. "That's the story. The rest of it isn't mine to tell you. It belongs to somebody else. If he's who I think he is, it's his. And if he isn't—" her voice wavered, just slightly, and steadied— "then it's an old woman's sad story and it doesn't matter to anybody but me."
"Is he? Who you think?"
"I don't know, sweetheart. You tell me." She reached over and took a small photograph off the stack beside the couch. "Is your daddy left-handed?"
He stared at her.
"Carter was," she said. She didn't wait for him to answer; she must have seen it on his face. "Walt tried to break him of it. In those days people did. He'd tie his left hand to the chair at supper. Carter would sit there and eat with his right hand and drop half of it on the floor and not say a word, and then he'd go out to the shed after and fix the lawn mower with his left. He could fix anything. Radios. The toaster. He took apart the studio's light meter when he was nine and put it back together better than it came." She handed Carter the small photograph. A boy at a kitchen table, a radio in pieces in front of him, a soldering iron in his left hand, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth.
"Does he fix things?" she asked. "Your daddy?"
Carter couldn't answer. He was looking at the tongue. His father did that. When he was working on something with tiny screws, under the shop light, he did exactly that, and Carter's mother teased him about it.