"At the bus stop. An old lady. Her pictures blew all over and I helped her pick them up. She's from Bisbee."
"Huh." His father took the loupe out of his eye and set it on the bench. He picked up a rag and wiped his hands, which were not dirty. "That was nice of you."
"Her name's Mrs. Abbott."
His father put the rag down.
"Lots of people named Abbott," he said. "Abbott and Costello. Who's on first." He picked up the screwdriver again. He looked at the VCR. He didn't put the loupe back in. "You better get out of those wet clothes before your mother sees you. She'll say you'll catch pneumonia, and then she'll tell me nobody catches pneumonia from rain, and then we'll be arguing about it for a week."
It was a joke. It was the kind of joke his father made. But he made it to the VCR, not to Carter, and his voice had gone flat in the middle like a tire.
"Okay," Carter said.
He went inside. The house was dim and cool and smelled like wet straw from the cooler pads. He went down the hall past his parents' closed door on tiptoe and into his room and shut his own door and sat down on the bed with the photograph in his hand.
It had warped a little in his pocket. He smoothed it on his knee.
C. A. R.
Then he got up and went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror and looked at his own face for a long time. He put his hand over his forehead and hair, like a ball cap. He squinted one eye more than the other. He tried the grin.
He went back to his room, opened the drawer of his nightstand, and took out the only picture of his father that he had ever seen from before the year 1972.
There weren't any. That was the thing. That was the thing he had never quite let himself think about, because it was like a loose tooth: once you started pushing on it you couldn't stop. In his parents' wedding album, his father was twenty-six and standing on the steps of a gray stone church in the rain with his mother laughing under a big black umbrella. That was the first picture. Before that there was nothing. No baby pictures. No school pictures. No uncles at picnics. His mother's side had boxes of the stuff, Grandma and Grandpa Lowell in North Vancouver sent a fat envelope every Christmas with snapshots of cousins in snowsuits. His father's side was a blank wall. Even the name was his mother's. That was a family joke, the kind you heard so many times you stopped hearing it: how his mother had been Lena Lowell all her life, and how his father had turned up in Vancouver as a Lowell too, no relation, and how a mix-up over a package at the post office on Hastings Street was how they'd met. "Saved me changing the monogram on the towels," his mother always said, and his father always smiled at his plate.
"Fire," his father had said, the one time Carter asked, when he was eight and had to do a family tree for school. "House burned down when I was a kid. Everything went." And then, when Carter had asked about his grandparents for the tree, his father had said, "Gone. Both of them. Before you were born," in a voice that meant the conversation was over, and Carter had drawn two empty boxes on his poster board and written UNKNOWN in them, and Mrs. Pacheco had given him a B-minus.
The drawer had nothing in it but baseball cards and a broken Walkman and a Garbage Pail Kids sticker of Adam Bomb.