Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl

next to a shingle-sided bungalow and a car with running boards. Regardless of age, she has strong cheekbones, a short, straight nose, a broad, rounded forehead, and a penetrating, dramatic look in her eyes.

      Decades of vacations, weddings, holidays, school portraits, and family get-togethers are all shuffled together, as if inside this box, linear time has unraveled and everything is happening all at once.

      As a dive master and PADI scuba instructor I have had to learn rudimentary photography in order to take underwater shots for tourists and ID portraits for certification students. I can’t help but chortle at how consistently terrible the photography in these pictures is. So many shots centered on the faces, so the subjects are cut off at the waist and half the picture is empty space above their heads. Sunbursts in windows or mirrors from reflected flashbulbs. Overexposures, underexposures, jittery, cockeyed Polaroids. People with their heads or half their bodies cut off, out of focus, or lost in shadows. Fingers over the lens.

      The most consistent blunder I see is the photographer standing too far from the subjects, so the people are tiny and their faces have no discernible expression. This is especially true of the vacation pictures, where presumably the excuse is the photographer wanted to get a lot of scenery in the shot, as if they really needed to have a permanent record of that particular beach. But it is also characteristic of the really old pictures from the time my grandparents were young and photography for the masses was a novelty. Some of these old photos are black and white, some are sepia. Virtually all of them are group shots with a whole lot of people lined up, as if at a company picnic. Even though the faces in these pictures are no bigger than match heads, just eye sockets and tiny hyphens for mouths, I can recognize my grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and my mother and her siblings as small children.

      Here is photographic evidence that these folks all got together with some regularity back then. Now, the idea of assembling a group that size from either of my parents’ families seems ludicrous, as they are scattered across the continent, estranged, divorced, too busy to write each other, let alone assemble for a group photo. In this respect I think my extended family is fairly typical, and this strikes me as a change the last seventy years has wrought that is more significant than space travel or personal computers.

      Near the bottom of the box I find a sealed envelope, yellowed, with “Lake / Audrey” handwritten on it in black ballpoint. It opens easily. Inside are a couple of black and white negatives. I hold one up to the light and see tiny black-faced minstrels standing on a granite slab in a sea of milk. As small as they are, I can recognize my mother and father. They are on a swimming raft in a lake. My mother’s blond hair is black as ink. She’s wearing a two-piece suit; she has a good figure, a little thick in the ankles. My father’s black hair is white, his baggy trunks riding low enough to reveal love handles and a slight paunch. Both are smiling, showing a lot of black teeth.

      The other negative is of a foursome, in front of what looks like a small log cabin. My mother is in the same swimming suit, holding a baby. My father has his arm around her waist. At his side, a child whose head does not reach my father’s hips is holding onto his index finger possessively with one hand and grasping a small object in the other.

      There is a Lake Audrey in western Sheboygan County, in the Kettle Moraine State Forest. My father took me fishing there when I was eleven. I sat on the grassy shore angling for bluegills with wax worms and a cane pole, while my dad waded in with hip boots and tossed a fly around. I remember it was a sunny day and the lake was weedy. We didn’t catch much, but we talked a lot and I don’t recall my father saying anything about having rented a cabin there when I was little. If Jamie was a baby, I must have been at least four. Old enough to have retained a few mental images, but I don’t remember it at all. This gives me a strange, hollow feeling, like I’ve lost a piece of myself and have no way of knowing how to get it back, or what else I may have lost. Maybe if I had prints made from these negatives, with a clearer image of the place I could dredge up a memory.

      Just beneath the envelope with the negatives I find a picture from a day I do remember, and vividly: the day Sheboygan got ten inches of lake-effect snow on the seventh of April.

      * *

      April, 1971

      School was cancelled, and my brother and I dashed to the quarry with our skis. One of the quarry walls was collapsed and it made a challenging, if brief, downhill ski run. There was no lift, of course, so after trudging up the hill ten times with our skis on our shoulders, we were worn out and went home.

      Snow shovels awaited us, planted imperatively in a deep drift at the end of the driveway. We made short work of the task and then employed the shovels to hastily build opposing forts in the backyard for a snowball fight. My brother threw harder than I did, and more accurately. He laughed more, too, and louder, and went absolutely wild with glee whenever one of his missiles found its mark.

      The snow was the sticky, good-packing kind, and after twenty minutes we looked like ambulatory snowmen. My father stepped out on the back porch with no coat or gloves and took this picture of me and Jamie, white-coated like powdered doughnuts, our faces red, wet, and raw. Then he called us in for hot chocolate.

      Jamie and I stomped the snow off our boots and hung up our ski jackets in the mud room, both of us punchy from fresh air and exhaustion. My mother placed steaming mugs on the table. The kitchen was warm and smelled of chocolate. My father wasn’t there. I had almost shaken off the malaise from the sleepless night I had just spent worrying about my parents and the letter from the Bank of Wisconsin. The stricken look on my mother’s face brought it back.

      “Jamie, hang up your coat. It’s on the floor.” Grief in her voice, as if the jacket were a dead infant.

      “So what?”

      “You have to make that jacket last another year.”

      “Forget it. I hate that jacket. The sleeves are too short already.”

      My mother stood at the kitchen sink, pressing the tips of her fingers against her forehead. “You have to take better care of your things.” Her jaw muscles clenched. “Hang the jacket in the closet.”

      “I’m tired. I’ll do it later.”

      Jamie held his mug in both hands and blew on his hot chocolate. My mother whirled around and yelled, “Pick it up!” Jamie ignored her. I couldn’t decide whether he was being valiantly defiant or just obtuse. With Jamie it was hard to tell the difference. Either way, I thought he was about to catch hell, which was always a guilty pleasure for me.

      Before my mother said another word, Jamie took a sip of his hot chocolate and spit it out in a spray. “The cocoa’s too hot!” he snarled. “I burned my mouth! Gah!” He banged the mug down, slopping half its contents onto the table, and bolted from the room.

      My mother started to mop up the spilled brown liquid with a dishcloth, then slumped down in Jamie’s chair and leaned forward with her brow resting on the heel of her hand. Her hair, which she usually wore in a Jackie Kennedy flip that sentenced her to sleep in large rollers, was shapeless and hung over her face. The bright sunlight that streamed through the kitchen window illuminated the gray in her hair and wrinkles around her mouth and eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. Her shoulders shook. She was crying.

      Until that morning, I had never seen my mother cry, except a couple of times when we were watching the Hallmark Hall of Fame on television. I’m sure she wept plenty of times, like the day Dr. McNulty called to report that an x-ray showed Jamie had bone cancer (three days later he called back and told her a specialist overread the x-ray and said it was just a minor stress fracture, sorry to have worried you). But she never let us kids see her cry, and I felt sort of honored that she was showing me her emotions in this crisis, like in some way it elevated me to adult status.

      I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t hug much in my family. I considered saying, “It’ll be all right, Mom,” but I didn’t know if that was true and was afraid it might sound juvenile. So I said nothing.

      “Jonathan,” she said, and sniffed deeply. “There’s something I have to tell you. I’m going to need your help to get through this.”

      Gosh.