* * *
He didn't sleep. He lay on top of the sheet in the dark with the cooler going again, steady now, rattling the vent over his bed, and he thought about the patch and the card and the ticket stub and the woman laughing backward behind the counter. He thought about his father's tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. He thought about a man tying a boy's left hand to a chair.
Around midnight he got up and went to his desk and took out the thing Mrs. Abbott had pressed into his hand at the door the last time, along with a paper sack of oatmeal cookies he hadn't eaten. It was a new print, a fresh one, off the negative. Carter. Age 11. Warren Ballpark. June 1956. She'd written it again on the back in her slanted pencil, and under it, in ink, smaller: Keep this. I have the negative. — E.A.
He sat there with it until the window started going gray.
* * *
The next night was Wednesday, which was meatloaf, and his mother had slept through the afternoon and was going in at seven, so they ate at five-thirty with the sun still blazing through the kitchen curtains. His mother was in her scrubs already, the pink ones, with her hair pinned up and her badge clipped to her pocket. LENA LOWELL RN. His father had come in from the carport and washed his hands at the kitchen sink with the orange Gojo that smelled like oranges and gasoline.
Carter waited until everybody had food.
Then he took the photograph out of his lap, where he had been holding it under the table, and put it face up on the oilcloth next to his father's plate.
Nobody said anything.
His mother saw it first, because she was looking at Carter, and she followed his eyes. She saw it and her fork stopped. She knew. He saw it on her face. She didn't know this picture, but she knew what it was.
"Ray," she said softly.
His father looked down.
For a long time he didn't do anything. He just looked. The meatloaf steamed. The kitchen clock, the one shaped like a teapot, ticked. Through the window Carter could hear the Ruiz kids next door screaming in the sprinkler.
Then his father picked up the photograph by the edges, the way you were supposed to, the way Mrs. Abbott did, and turned it over and read the back. And Carter watched him read the second line, the one in ink. I have the negative.
His father put it down.