When he straightened up, she was looking at him instead of the box.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice was different. Thinner. "I don't — you have no idea. You have no idea what those are."
"Family pictures?"
"Family pictures." She laughed a little, but it wasn't really a laugh. "Forty years of family pictures. I was taking them to Desert Camera to have copies made. I was going to have copies made of every one, so there'd be two. So it couldn't be all of them at once, if something happened." She looked out at the rain. "Something happened."
"I think I got most of them," he said. "One went over the top. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. My Lord. Sit down. You're soaked."
They sat. The rain roared on the roof of the shelter so loud they had to lean toward each other to hear. Water was running down Speedway in a brown sheet, curb to curb, and the cars had slowed to a crawl with their headlights on in the middle of the afternoon. The air smelled like it always did after the first rain, wet creosote, sharp and green, the smell his mom said she would never get used to and never wanted to.
The old woman took a handkerchief out of her straw purse and began to dry the photographs one by one, dabbing at them, holding them by the edges. Carter watched. He couldn't help it. They were the kind of pictures you saw in a junk shop, in a bin by the register, people you didn't know squinting at the sun in clothes nobody wore anymore. A man in a fedora standing by a car with big round fenders. A little girl on a pony. A row of men in hard hats, filthy, grinning, with a mountain behind them that had been cut into steps.
She turned one over and he saw handwriting on the back, slanted and neat, in pencil: Walt & the crew, Sacramento Pit, 1948.
"You write on all of them?" he asked.
"Every one." She turned another. Easter, 1951. "My mother never did, and when she died I had a whole trunk of strangers. I swore I'd never do that to anybody." She paused. "Not that it's done much good."
"Why not?"
She didn't answer. She was holding a photograph a little apart from the others, and he leaned over, because he was eleven and nobody had taught him yet not to.
It was a family on a front porch. A wooden house on a hillside, steep steps, a screen door. A man in shirtsleeves with his arm around a woman in a flowered dress, and he realized, with a little jolt, that the woman was her, younger, with dark hair, but her. In front of them stood a little girl in a white dress with a basket.
And next to the little girl there was a hole.