The Rest of the Story(65)

“I’m sure we do,” he replied. “The tricky part will be finding them.”

He got up, crossing the room quickly over to a low cabinet beneath a window. When he bent down, pulling open the doors, I saw it was jammed full of photo albums of all types, sizes, and colors.

“Like a needle in a haystack,” he said, taking out a small flowered one that was wedged at the top and opening it. After scanning a page, he said, “Well, this one documents my awkward stage. So we can rule that out.”

“Can I see?”

“No,” he said flatly, putting it on the cabinet and taking out another one that was deep green, square, with an embossed cover. Opening it, he said, “Oh, here’s a picture of Waverly. So at least we’re getting closer.”

He handed the album to me. Sure enough, in the right-hand corner was a snapshot of my mom, in rolled-up jeans and a Blackwood Station T-shirt, bent over one of the dock pumps. “I wonder when this was.”

Roo, now rummaging through the rest of the cabinet, glanced over my shoulder. “Well, that’s the old Pavilion. It got taken out by a hurricane in 1997, so it had to be before that.”

“She met my dad in 1999,” I said. “And I guess she left for Lakeview in—”

“2000,” he finished for me. “That fall, after my dad died.”

I looked at the picture again. In it, my mom would have been around the same age I was now, although she looked like much more of a grown-up than I felt. What was it about pictures that aged people?

“Okay,” Roo said suddenly, putting another album, this one burgundy-colored, on the top of the cabinet and opening it. “I think we’re getting somewhere. Look.”

It was a picture of three little girls with blond hair, sitting at the picnic table below Mimi’s. They were all in swimsuits, eating Popsicles, and turned in the same direction, as if they’d been told to look at whoever was taking the shot. I immediately picked out myself, in the red tank suit with a giraffe on it. It took a second of looking this time, but only that, to realize the other two were Bailey and Trinity.

“That’s the summer,” I said. “2005. My parents split up that fall.”

“So we were four.”

“Yep.” I looked to the next picture, also of the beach area at Mimi’s, but this one was of a skinny little boy in a skiff, holding a set of oars. “Is that you?”

“Nope. Jack. He’s always been skinnier and taller.” He pointed to the row below. “That’s me.”

I leaned in closer, taking him in: towheaded and skinny as well, in baggy shorts and a T-shirt with a dinosaur on it. He was sitting on the hood of a car, feet balanced on the front bumper. Behind him, you could see the driver’s-side door was open, an arm—thick and hairy—cut off by the frame.

“Who’s that?” I asked, indicating the driver.

“Some boyfriend of my mom’s,” he said with a shrug. “There was a string of them for a while there. Then she went back to school and didn’t have time to date.”

“Did she ever remarry?”

“Nope.” He squinted down at the shot again. “I think I remember that car, actually. It was huge. The guy was small. Probably compensating.”

I looked again as well, but you couldn’t really tell much by just an arm. “My dad was the opposite. Didn’t date anyone for years, just threw himself into work. Tracy was the first woman he brought home, and now they’re married.”

“You like her?”

I nodded. “She’s nice. She makes him happy. Plus, she likes to sail, which I hate.”

“Ticks every box,” Roo said.

“Exactly.” I picked up the album. “Okay if I look at this one over on the couch?”

“Sure. I’ll keep digging, see if there’s another one.”

I got through two full pages before I saw something that brought me to tears. Weirdly, it was not the shot of Bailey and Jack with my parents in the background, my dad with his arm over my mom’s shoulders. Or the one of Celeste and my mom, posing together in front of what I was pretty sure was the same gardenia bush where we’d taken our pictures before Club Prom. Instead, it was a picture I’d almost passed over. It was of an older woman in a lawn chair, taken from behind, and the composition was weird, everything in the picture over to one side and just empty lake on the other. It was only when I looked more closely that I saw she had a child in her lap, blond-headed, and that they were holding hands. You could see a gold bracelet, braided and thick, on the woman’s wrist. The child held a stuffed giraffe in her arms. Me, Mimi, and George.

By this point I’d seen my own face and that of my parents, cousins, aunt, and grandmother repeated in square after square of snapshots. But there was something about seeing my beloved giraffe there as well that made this one picture feel like the ultimate proof that the trip really happened. When things were hard between my parents, and later, when my mom moved out, he was the one I cried to most, burying my face in the soft, nubby fur of his neck. He’d stayed on my bed all the way up until high school before I’d moved him across the room to a shelf, where he remained close enough for me to see before I fell asleep every night. Even now, I knew exactly where he was: in the final box I’d packed up from my room at Nana’s, with my books and favorite pictures. It would be the first one I would unpack in the new house, once I got there.