It was the first time in four years I had heard him say anything about my mother that wasn't about a check.
He showed us the light meter, the little needle on the side of the viewfinder that swings up and down, and how you turn the shutter speed dial and the aperture ring until the needle sits in the middle. He showed us how to focus by turning the lens until the split circle in the center of the viewfinder came together into one picture. Niva knew some of it from Ms. Haddad's class, but she let him explain it anyway, and I saw her watching his hands the way I was.
"Twenty-four tries," I said, when the camera was loaded and back in my hands, heavy and warm and ready. "Don't waste them and don't save them either."
Niva went red. "That was the best thing I could think of. I wrote like nine versions."
"It's good," I said. "It's actually really good."
It was almost five-thirty. The light in the kitchen window had gone gold and slanting, the way it does in October in the late afternoon, when it comes in low across the houses and lights up the dust in the air.
"The marsh closes at dusk," my father said. "We'd have maybe forty minutes."
We all looked at each other.
"I'm seventy-eight years old," said Grandma Ardis, "and I'm wearing my good shoes. I'll wait in the car with the heater on and you can bring me back a picture of a duck."
So we went. The four of us in my father's Corolla with the new starter, which had cost one hundred and ninety dollars eighteen months ago and which I now knew the exact price of, out past the Aud and the hospital and over the Arterial, to the parking lot at the Utica Marsh, where there were only two other cars and a man in a Bills jacket loading a canoe onto his roof. Grandma Ardis stayed in the front seat with the radio on the classical station and her coat buttoned up to her chin. Niva and my father and I walked out onto the boardwalk.