"No ma'am. He's from up north. He doesn't really talk about it." Carter shrugged. "His folks died before I was born. He says he grew up all over. My mom's from Canada. Vancouver. That's where I was born, but we moved here when I was three, so I don't remember it."
He was looking at the rain when he said it, so he didn't see her face. When he looked back she had both hands flat on the lid of the shoebox again.
"Vancouver," she said.
"Yeah. It rains there all the time. Like, not like this. My mom says it's like a sprinkler that never turns off."
"I've heard that," Evelyn Abbott said.
"Where are you from?" he asked, because it seemed like his turn.
"Bisbee," she said. "Warren, really, but Warren's part of Bisbee. Nobody in Tucson has ever heard of Warren." She was quiet a moment. "I've lived down there since I was a girl. I only came up here this spring."
The number six bus came grinding up out of the water with a wave curling off its front wheels, and the doors folded open with a hiss. The driver leaned out. "You getting on, ma'am? I'm not waiting in this."
She stood up. She stood up slowly, holding the box against her chest, and then she did something that surprised him. She opened her straw purse and took out a paper envelope, the kind Desert Camera gave you your prints in, with the little window, and she tore off the flap and wrote on the back of it with the same pencil she used for the photographs. She handed it to him.
Evelyn Abbott. Casa Grande Apartments, #14, 2200 E. Elm St. And a phone number.
"If you would," she said. "If you ever wanted to come by. I make a very good lemonade, and I owe you a great deal more than lemonade." She hesitated on the step of the bus. The driver sighed loudly. "And Carter. If your father ever did want to talk about up north. You could tell him an old lady at a bus stop asked."
"Lady," the driver said.
"I'm going," she said, and went.
The doors hissed shut. The bus pulled away with its wipers going like crazy, and through the streaked window he saw her sit down in the first seat with the shoebox in her lap, not looking out, looking down at it.
* * *