There was a driver's license in it, expired. A Phelps Dodge retiree card. Twelve dollars. A picture of Mrs. Abbott in a cardboard sleeve, young, in a hat.
And behind that, in the slot where you would keep the thing you didn't want to lose, a square of newsprint, yellow and brittle, folded small and folded again and folded so many times along the same creases that it had worn nearly through at the corners.
His father unfolded it. Slowly. It was a clipping from the Arizona Daily Star, January 22, 1977, with a photograph of a man with big teeth standing at a podium. But Walt Abbott had folded it so that, when it was closed, only one word of the headline showed on the outside, in heavy black letters an inch tall.
CARTER.
His father turned the square over and over. Folded it shut, so the name showed. Opened it. Folded it shut.
"She said he'd take it out and look at it," Carter said. "At supper sometimes. He'd take it out and put it next to his plate and just look at it and not say anything. For six years. And then at the end, in the bedroom at home, with the shades down, he said to her, Find him, Evie. That's what he said. Find him." Carter's voice was shaking now, and he let it. "She tried. She wrote the Canadian government. She wrote the Red Cross. She called every Abbott in the Vancouver phone book. There wasn't one that was you. Because you weren't Abbott anymore."
His father put the folded clipping against his mouth and shut his eyes.
They stayed like that a long time, the man on the stool and the boy beside him, under the buzzing light, with the wedding tape hanging in brown loops off the bench and the waterbed man going on and on about free delivery.
Finally his father lowered the clipping.
"What's her number," he said.
* * *
He didn't call her. In the end he couldn't. He stood at the kitchen phone with the number in his hand for ten minutes, and twice he dialed the first four digits, and twice he put the receiver back down in its cradle and stood looking at it. Then he got his keys off the hook and said, "Come on," and Carter got in the truck.
It was three o'clock. Of course it was. The clouds were stacking up over the Catalinas, white on top and slate underneath, and the air had that heavy, waiting feeling. They drove down Campbell with the windows open because the air conditioning in the truck had been broken since Easter and his father kept saying he'd get to it. Neither of them talked. At a red light his father reached over and turned off the radio, and then a block later turned it back on, and then turned it off again.
He parked across the street from the Casa Grande Apartments and cut the engine.
He didn't get out.