Nick held up the box he was working on. “And this is 2005. There were plenty of digital cameras by then. Half these boxes could probably be on a hard drive.”
Laurie smiled. “They probably could.” She ran her finger around the white border of a picture of her parents at Christmas. It was faded and discolored, aged in the way it wouldn’t be if it had, in fact, been on a hard drive. “Maybe she liked watching things change when they got old.”
June paused over the work she was doing. “Can I ask you a question, Laur? Do you want to be going through all of these pictures, or do you feel like you have to go through all of them? Because I don’t mind at all, I love seeing you, and I would hang out with you and sort boxes of socks if you needed me to. But you know you don’t have to do it just because you can.”
Nick looked up and flicked his eyes back and forth between the two of them, then he kept working on 2005.
Laurie put everything down and lay on the floor, pulling her knees into her chest to stretch out her back. She thought about Dot holding a camera at her parents’ anniversary party and at a state park. Someone had taken the picture outside Avenue Q, someone Dot had tapped on the shoulder and asked politely. She sat back up. “Junie, when your parents die, who’s going to go through their stuff?”
June blinked. “Mary Jo and I, probably.”
“Are you going to look at their pictures?”
She nodded. “Sure.”
“Every picture, right? At least for a second? Or at least one in every album, one in every box, to see what all there is?”
“Most likely.”
“How about you, Cooper? Are you going to look at all your parents’ pictures someday? Are you going to look at your dad’s baseball cards and all the fishing tackle and flip through their college yearbooks?”
He looked at her and he smiled, just a little, and she remembered for some reason the jacket he used to wear, with the shearling collar, which she would grab on to when he kissed her. “I’m sure I’ll do that. But it’s kind of my thing, professionally speaking.”
“I might run out of steam at some point,” Laurie said, looking idly at an unlabeled and faded shot of fall foliage. “I just think Dot should have that, too. Even though she doesn’t have daughters. Or a librarian.” She sighed. “You know what I mean?”
It got quiet, and then Nick raised his half-full glass. “To Dot. And every picture.”
“To Dot,” June said.
“Dot,” Laurie echoed. They all awkwardly leaned forward on their knees for a dull juice-glass clink, and they went back to work.
They debriefed Nick on his path to running the library, which ran through grad school, his return to Calcasset, his dad’s retirement, and then his mom’s. Laurie told them about being out on a story about frogs in Borneo and getting caught in a rainstorm so sudden she climbed a tree and stayed in it for an hour and a half just to make sure she wouldn’t get washed away. June recounted how Tommy had learned to love instant mashed potatoes when he got his tonsils out, and now he wanted to eat them all the time.
They’d been on the floor together for two hours or so when Laurie leaned forward with a picture from the 1970 box. In it, a man with his back to the camera was at a workbench. “I don’t know where this is,” she said, shaking her head. “But tell me what that looks like to you, the thing on the bench all the way over on the right.” She handed the picture to June.
“It looks like the front end of a bird.” June handed it to Nick.
He nodded. “Looks like half a duck.”
The head was tawny brown and didn’t have a crest; this was certainly not her duck. But it looked very much like the front of a duck, nonetheless. “Do you guys have any idea who that is?”
“I haven’t,” June said, “but I mean, it’s his back. Other than that he has hair that’s turning gray, it could be just about anybody.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty hard to tell,” Nick said. He looked at the front and the back of the picture. “People don’t label anything, it drives me crazy.” He handed it back to Laurie. “Do me a favor, both of you. Think of the librarians, think of the historians, and label your stuff.”
“You mean it’s not enough to just write ‘Leo’ on the bottom of a picture?” Laurie asked.
“It’s not ideal.”
“Well,” Laurie said, “I guess it’s my fault for not paying more attention.”