Lock and Key(54)

“Harriet?” I said. “Really? She’s so organized at work.”

“That’s work, though,” he replied. “I mean—”

“Nate!”

He stopped walking and turned to look over at a nearby red truck, a guy in a leather jacket and sunglasses standing next to it. “Robbie,” he said. “What’s up?”

“You tell me,” the guy called back. “Coach said you’ve quit the team for good now. And you had that U scholarship in the bag, man. What gives?”

Nate glanced at me, then pulled his bag farther up his shoulder. “I’m just too busy,” he said as the guy came closer. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, but come on,” the guy replied. “We need you! Where’s your senior loyalty?”

I heard Nate say something but couldn’t make it out as I kept walking. This clearly had nothing to do with me. I was about halfway to the green when I glanced behind me. Already, Nate was backing away from the guy in the leather jacket, their conversation wrapping up.

I only had a short walk left to the green. The same one I would have been taking alone, all this time, if left to my own devices. But as I stepped up onto the curb, I had a flash of Olivia, her reluctant expression as she stood by my locker, wanting to be square, not owing me or anyone anything. It was a weird feeling, knowing you were indebted, if not connected. Even stranger, though, was being aware of this, not liking it, and yet still finding yourself digging in deeper, anyway. Like, for instance, consciously slowing your steps so it still looked accidental for someone to catch up from behind, a little out of breath, and walk with you the rest of the way.

The picture was of a group of people standing on a wide front porch. By their appearance—sideburns and loud prints on the men, printed flowy dresses and long hair on the women—I guessed it was taken sometime in the seventies. In the back, people were standing in haphazard rows; in the front, children were plopped down, sitting cross-legged. One boy had his tongue sticking out, while two little girls in front wore flowers in their hair. In the center, there was a girl in a white dress sitting in a chair, two elderly women on each side of her.

There had to be fifty people in all, some resembling each other, others looking like no one else around them. While a few were staring right into the camera with fixed smiles on their faces, others were laughing, looking off to one side or the other or at each other, as if not even aware a picture was being taken. It was easy to imagine the photographer giving up on trying to get the shot and instead just snapping the shutter, hoping for the best.

I’d found the photo on the island when I came downstairs, and I picked it up, carrying it over to the table to look at while I ate my breakfast. By the time Jamie came down twenty minutes later, I should have long moved on to the paper and my horoscope, but I was still studying it.

“Ah,” he said, heading straight to the coffeemaker. “You found the ad. What do you think?”

“This is an ad?” I asked. “For what?”

He walked over to the island. “Actually,” he said, digging around under some papers, “that’s not the ad. This is.”

He slid another piece of paper in front of me. At the top was the picture I’d been looking at, with the words IT’S ABOUT FAMILY in thick typewriter-style block print beneath it. Below that was another picture, taken in the present day, of a bunch of twenty-somethings gathered on what looked like the end zone of a football field. They were in Tshirts and jeans, some with arms around each other, others with hands lifted in the air, clearly celebrating something. IT’S ABOUT FRIENDS, it said underneath. Finally, a third picture, which was of a computer screen, filled with tiny square shots of smiling faces. Looking more closely, I could see they were same ones as in the other pictures, cut out and cropped down, then lined up end to end. Underneath, it said, IT’S ABOUT CONNECTING: UME.COM.

“The idea,” Jamie explained over my shoulder, “is that while life is getting so individualistic—we all have our own phones, our own e-mail accounts, our own everything—we continue to use those things to reach out to each other. Friends, family . . . they’re all part of communities we make and depend on. And UMe helps you do that.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Thousands spent on an advertising agency,” he said, reaching for the cereal box between us, “hours wasted in endless meetings, and a major print run about to drop any minute. And all you can say is ‘wow’?”

“It’s better than ‘it sucks,’” Cora said, entering the kitchen with Roscoe at her heels. “Right?”

“Your sister,” Jamie told me in a low voice, “does not like the campaign.”

“I never said that,” Cora told him, pulling the fridge open and taking out a container of waffles as Roscoe headed my way, sniffing the floor. “I only said that I thought your family might not like being featured, circa nineteen seventy-six, in magazines and bus shelters nationwide.”

I looked back at the top picture, then at Jamie. “This is your family?”

“Yep,” he said.

“And that’s not even all of them,” Cora added, sticking some waffles into the toaster oven. “Can you even believe that? They’re not a family. They’re a tribe.”

“My grandmother was one of six children,” Jamie explained.