"They're getting wet," his father said. His voice was barely there.
"Then come upstairs," his grandmother said. "I have more."
* * *
They went to Bisbee on a Sunday at the end of September, when the monsoon had burned itself out and the sky over the San Pedro Valley was so blue it looked fake. The four of them in the truck, which now had working air conditioning, though nobody needed it. Carter's mother had made sandwiches. Mrs. Abbott — Grandma, she said to call her, and he was trying, but it came out Mrs. Grandma the first few times and made everybody laugh — sat in the middle with her straw purse on her knees and an old camera case at her feet, a square leather box with a strap.
They came over the Mule Pass and through the tunnel, and the town fell away below them on both sides, little houses stuck to the steep hills like they'd been thrown there, tin roofs and stone walls and stairs, hundreds of stairs. And then the Lavender Pit opened up on the right, enormous, a bowl carved into the earth in layers of red and rust and gray and, yes, lavender, deeper than anything Carter had imagined from the encyclopedia.
"Whoa," he said.
"Your grandpa helped dig that," Grandma said.
His father didn't say anything. But he slowed the truck down so they could look.
They went to Warren Ballpark first. It was empty, the grass gone brown at the edges, the old stone grandstand quiet. His father walked out to the backstop and put his hand flat on the chain-link and stood there. Then he went back to the truck and came out with a glove, an old one Carter had never seen, and Carter's own glove, and a ball.
They played catch on the infield for an hour. His father threw left-handed. So did Carter. Grandma sat in the grandstand with her camera in her lap and didn't take a single picture. "Some things you just watch," she said afterward.
Then they went up the hill to Evergreen Cemetery. Walt Abbott's stone was gray granite, flat to the ground, with an anchor and a globe carved into the corner. WALTER J. ABBOTT. USMC. 1917–1983. His father stood looking down at it with his hands in his pockets. Nobody said anything. After a long time he crouched and took something out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the stone, and pressed it down with his thumb so the wind wouldn't take it. A round felt patch. A pickax crossed with a bat. COPPER KINGS.
"He came to every game," his father said, to nobody in particular. "Every single one. He'd stand behind the backstop and not say anything. Not even when I struck out. He'd just stand there." He stayed crouched a moment longer. Then he stood up and said, "Okay," the way he said it at the bench when something finally worked.
Last, they drove up to the house.
It was on a street called O'Hara Avenue, a narrow road that switchbacked up the side of the hill. The wooden house was still there, painted yellow now instead of white, with a different family's tricycle on the porch. The screen door was the same. The steep steps were the same. A woman came out and stood with her arms folded, suspicious, and then Grandma got out of the truck and said something to her, and pointed at the camera, and the woman's face softened, and she nodded and went back inside.
Grandma took the camera out of its case. It was a big boxy thing with two lenses, one on top of the other, and you looked down into it from above instead of through it. She set it on the hood of the truck on top of her folded purse, aimed it at the porch steps, and squinted down into it for a long time, adjusting.