Day Seven I Signed It novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Behind the Photograph

I drove to my mother's house with my father's photograph on the passenger seat and one tab of its frame bent open.

The porch light was on.

Through the kitchen window I could see two people sitting at the table with cups of tea.

My mother sat with her back very straight.

Across from her, in a navy jacket, sat Gavin.

I came in without knocking.

"Colin," Joan said. "Sit down."

"Mom, get away from him."

"I'm having tea," she said, in the voice she'd used on forty years of principals. "In my own kitchen. Sit down, please."

I didn't sit.

Gavin put his cup down.

He looked at the frame in my hand, and he looked at my face.

"You opened it," he said.

"Not yet."

"Then do it here. I'd like you to do it where your mother can see."

My mother nodded once.

I put the frame on the table, face down, between the sugar bowl and the teapot.

I bent open the other three tabs.

The backing came away, and with it, tucked between the wood and the glass, fell two things.

One was an old photograph, creased and soft at the corners.

The other was a folded sheet of lined paper that I didn't touch yet.

I picked up the photograph.

It showed a man in his late thirties, standing on a porch step that I didn't know.

He was laughing.

It was my father, younger than I had ever seen him, with a dark beard he must have shaved before I was born.

On his hip he held a little boy of about three, with a mop of dark hair and big gray eyes, fisting a handful of my father's shirt.

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