"He let me do layaway," Niva said. "Fifteen a week. He said he'd never done layaway on a camera before but he'd hold it in the back for me as long as I kept coming in. So I kept coming in. Every Saturday after my shift. I'd bring him a coffee from work and fifteen dollars, and sometimes twenty if tips were good, and he'd write it down in the green book under my name. Sunniva Sokol. He said he'd never had a Sunniva before." She laughed, finally, a short wet laugh. "He said it sounded like a cruise ship."
I thought about Saturdays. I thought about all the Saturdays since March that Niva had come home late from the coffee shop and I had thought she was out with Delphine, or at the library, or just walking around downtown taking pictures on her phone for the portfolio, which is what she said she was doing whenever anyone asked. Twenty-nine Saturdays, about. I did the math in my head without wanting to. I am good at math in the way some people are good at whistling, without trying.
"You could have used that money for your application," my father said. "The fee. The portfolio printing. Niva, you've been talking about the printing for a month. You told me it was a hundred dollars just to get the prints done right."
"I know."
"So why would you—"
"Because it was ours," Niva said, and her voice cracked straight down the middle. "Because you sold it and you didn't tell anybody and you just, you carried it around, I could see you carrying it around, Dad, every time somebody said the word camera you'd get this look, and then you'd go take a shower for forty-five minutes. And I thought, if it came back, maybe you wouldn't have to carry it anymore. I thought it could just—show up. Like it was never gone. And nobody would have to talk about it."
"So you left it on the porch," I said. "With no name."
She nodded.
"And you wrote it in capitals so I wouldn't know your handwriting."
She nodded again.