She stood up. She was going to go after them. Carter could see it, and he could also see that she was seventy years old at least, in canvas shoes, in a dust storm, and that the wind would knock her flat on Speedway Boulevard.
"Stay here," he said. "I got it. Stay here."
He went.
The photographs were everywhere. They were plastered flat against the shelter's back panel. They were skittering across the sidewalk like crabs. They were cartwheeling into the parking lot of the Circle K and sliding under the cars at the pumps. One went straight up and over the roof of the shelter, and he never saw it again, and for weeks afterward he would wonder which one it had been.
He went low, the way you'd go after grounders. He slapped them flat with his palms and pinned them under his sneakers and scooped them against his chest. Square ones with white borders. Small ones with wavy scalloped edges. A big stiff one in a cardboard folder that he caught out of the air with both hands like a Frisbee. The dust got in his eyes and in his teeth. A car honked at him, long and angry, and he didn't even look.
There was a drainage ditch along the edge of the Circle K lot, the kind that was bone dry three hundred and fifty days a year and a river the other fifteen. Half a dozen photographs had blown down into it. He slid down the concrete side on his rear end and grabbed them off the bottom, and as he climbed out he felt the first fat drops of rain hit the back of his neck, warm as bathwater.
Rain. Rain was worse.
He ran. He ran with the photographs clutched against his stomach under his shirt, bent over them like a football, and he got back to the shelter just as the sky opened up and the dust turned to mud in the air and then to water.
The old woman was standing exactly where he had told her to stand. Her hands were knotted in front of her. Her hair, which had been pinned up, was coming down in white strands on one side.
"Here," he said, out of breath. "Here, I got — I got a lot of them. I don't know if I got all of them."
He pulled them out from under his shirt and she held out the empty shoebox, which she had somehow kept, and he put them in. They were a mess. Some were damp. Some had grit stuck to them. One had a long crease right down the middle where he had grabbed it too hard.
"Sorry," he said. "That one's my fault."
She didn't seem to hear him. She was looking down into the box, moving the photographs around with one finger, very fast, like she was counting. Her lips were moving.
"There were more on the wall," Carter said, and turned, and peeled four of them off the plexiglass where the wind had pinned them. The rain was coming in sideways now and he had to hunch over them. He put those in the box too. "And there's — hang on."
Two more were under the bench. One was stuck in the spokes of his bike. He got those.