"You three," she said. "On the steps. Lena, you too, don't be ridiculous."
"I'll take it," his mother said. "You should be in it."
"I'm going to be in it. There's a timer. Walt put it on in 1952 and I've never trusted it. Today it'll work." She bent over the camera. "Ray. Carter. Whatever you're calling yourself today. Stand up straight. Carter — the little one — take off that cap. I want to see that hair."
Carter took off his cap. His hair stood straight up at the crown. His father looked over at it and reached out and tried to flatten it with his palm, and it sprang right back, and his father laughed, and Carter saw him reach up and touch his own crown without seeming to know he was doing it.
Grandma pressed something on the camera. It began to whir. She came hurrying across the gravel, not as fast as she wanted to, and his father went down two steps and took her arm and brought her up, and she stood in the middle of them on the porch of the house where she had raised a boy named Carter, with her son's arm around her on one side and her grandson's shoulder under her hand on the other, and Lena on the step below them laughing about something, and the camera on the hood of the truck whirring and whirring.
"Is it going to go?" Carter whispered.
"It'll go," she said. "Hold still."
It went.
* * *
She printed it that week in her bathroom, hunched under the enlarger with the red bulb burning and the door shut and Carter on the closed lid of the toilet watching, because she had said he could. He watched the white paper go into the tray and lie there under the liquid, blank. Nothing. And then the faint shapes coming up out of nothing, gray at first, then darker, the porch, the steps, the screen door, four people, faces, each one rising up out of the white like someone surfacing from deep water.
She hung it up to dry on a line over the bathtub with a clothespin.
When it was dry she took it down, and turned it over, and took the pencil from behind her ear, and wrote on the back in her slanted hand, slow and careful, the way she had written on the backs of photographs her whole life so that no one would ever open a trunk and find only strangers.
O'Hara Avenue, Bisbee. September 28, 1986. Lena, Carter, Carter, and me.
She thought for a moment. Then she added one more line.
Everyone present.