His father looked up.
"In April. The green Ford. You parked by the Copper Queen, across from the studio, in the shade. I was in the back, in the darkroom, and I came out front for more paper, and I saw you through the blinds." She was holding the flat thing against her chest so tightly her knuckles were as white as his had been on the wheel. "I knew you. You were thirty-four years old and you had a beard and I knew you in one second from across Main Street. And Walt was right there at the counter. And I stood at the blinds. I stood there for an hour, and I didn't go out. I was so afraid of what he'd say. I was so afraid of what you'd say. I told myself if you got out of the truck I'd go out. I told myself, if he gets out, I'll go." She was crying now, openly, not wiping it. "And you didn't get out. And then you drove away. And I've had seven years to think about who should have gone first."
The rain was coming harder now. It was hitting the fountain in earnest, filling the cracks in the bottom.
"So we both sat there," his father said. His voice was hoarse.
"We both sat there."
"An hour."
"An hour and ten minutes," she said. "I looked at the clock when you left. I've always been precise about time. It's the photography."
And his father laughed. It came out of him all at once, broken in half, a laugh and a sob together, and he put his hand over his eyes. And she took the last six feet herself. She walked right across the wet concrete and put her arms around him with the flat thing still caught between them, and he bent down, because he was so much taller than her, he was so much taller than the boy in the striped shirt, and he put his face against her shoulder and his whole back shook.
Carter stood at the curb in the rain and didn't move. Water ran down his face and into the neck of his shirt. He didn't care. He didn't want to be anywhere else in the world.
After a while she said something into his father's shoulder that Carter couldn't hear, and his father nodded, and she stepped back and held out what she had been carrying.
It was an album. A new one, from the drugstore, with a plastic cover.
"I was going to finish it first," she said. "But I don't think we've got time to wait for me to finish things anymore."
His father opened it, standing there in the rain. Carter came up the walk now, slowly, and looked over his arm.
Every page was full. The porch with the screen door, and the little boy in short pants holding the ball, his face right there in the middle of it, seven years old and solemn. The kitchen table and the radio in pieces and the soldering iron in his left hand. Brewery Gulch and the burning sparkler. A boy on a pony. A boy in a cap and gown. A boy asleep on a couch with a dog. Every one of them printed fresh, white-bordered, sharp, from negatives that had sat in a box in the back of a studio for twenty years, waiting for somebody who understood that the print was only a copy.
There were no holes in any of them.