“Well, we got a new order,” Ian said.
“Right on!”
He pulled into traffic and said, “This woman came all the way from Massachusetts with a blanket box, her great-grandfather’s blanket box. Asked if we knew how to make one just like it, using the same methods. Exactly the kind of thing Mr. Brant likes best.”
Cicely made a sort of humming noise and nestled in against him.
“Soon as she left Mr. Brant told me, ‘Go call those kitchen people.’ People who wanted an estimate on their kitchen cabinets. ‘Call and cancel,’ he said. Cicely hon, stop that, please.”
“Stop what?” she asked him, in a smiling voice.
“You know what.”
“I’m not doing anything!” she said. She sat up straight. She slid over to her side of the car and set her face toward the window. “Mr. Holiness,” she muttered to a fire hydrant.
“Pretty soon we may give up kitchens altogether,” Ian said, turning down Waverly. He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “We’ll build nothing but fine furniture. Custom designs. Old-style joinery.”
Cicely wasn’t listening. All three of them sitting in back could tell that, just from the way she kept her face turned. But Ian said, “We might hire another worker, too. At least, Mr. Brant’s thinking about it. I said, ‘Good, hire several, and give me a raise while you’re at it,’ and he said he might do it. ‘I won’t be a single man forever,’ I told him.” Ian glanced over at Cicely when he said that, but Cicely was still looking out the window.
It was amazing, how he could talk on like that without realizing. When even they realized! Even little Daphne, sucking her thumb and watching Cicely with round, anxious eyes!
Thomas all at once felt so angry at Ian that he jumped out of the car in a rush and slammed the door loudly behind him.
Their grandma said they had to change clothes at once, this instant, because Aunt Claudia was arriving at five-thirty and they looked as if they’d spent the day rolling in a barnyard. She told Ian to run Daphne a bath, and she said, “Clean shirts for the other two! And clean shorts for Thomas. Hair combed. Faces washed.”
But the minute Ian’s back was turned, Thomas followed Agatha up the narrow, steep wooden stairs to the attic. He trailed her into the slanty-ceilinged attic bedroom that was hers and Daphne’s, that used to be Aunt Claudia’s when she was a girl at home. “Agatha,” he said, putting on a fake frown, “do you think we should’ve bought Aunt Claudia a present? Maybe a card will be too boring.”
What he was after, of course, was a glimpse of their mother’s jewelry box. He knew Agatha had to open it to return the mustard seed.
“You heard what Grandma said,” Agatha told him. “A handmade card means more than anything. What are you in my room for?”
“But she gives us presents,” Thomas said. He sat on her bed and swung his feet. “Maybe we should’ve made her something bigger, a picture for her wall or something.”
“I mean it, Thomas. You’re trespassing in my private room.”
“It’s Daphne’s room, too,” Thomas said. “Daphne would be glad to have me here.”
“Get out, I tell you.”
“Agatha, can’t I just watch you put the mustard seed away?”
“No, you can’t.”
“She wasn’t only your mama, you know.”
“Maybe not,” Agatha said, “but you don’t keep secrets good.”
“I do so. I didn’t tell about the jewelry box, did I?”
“You told our father’s name, though,” Agatha said, screwing up her eyes at him.
“That just slipped out! And anyway, I was little.”
“Well, who knows what’ll slip out next time?”
“Agatha, I implore you,” he said, clasping his hands. “How about I look at the picture and nothing else?”
“You’ll get it dirty.”
“How about I hold it by the edges, sitting here on the bed? I won’t ask to look at anything else, honest. I won’t even peek inside the box.”
She thought it over. She had taken the mustard seed from her pocket and he could see it glimmering between her fingers, so close he could have touched it.
“Well, okay,” she said finally.
“You’ll let me?”
“But just for a minute.”
She crossed to the closet, which was only more attic — the lowest part of the attic, where the ceiling slanted all the way down. It didn’t even have a door to shut. Thomas would have been scared to sleep near so much darkness, but Agatha wasn’t scared of anything, and she stepped inside as bold as you please and knelt on the floor. He heard the box’s bottom drawer slide open, and then the clink of the mustard seed against other clinky things — maybe the charm bracelet Agatha had let him sleep with once when he was sick, with the tiny scissors charm that could really cut paper and the tiny bicycle charm that could really spin its wheels.
She came back out, holding the picture by one corner. “Don’t you dare get a speck of dirt on it,” she said. He took it very, very gently between the flat of his hands, the way you’d take an LP record. The crinkly edges felt like little teeth against his palms.
It was a color photograph, with JUN 63 stamped on the border. A tin house trailer with cinder blocks for a doorstep. A pretty woman standing on the cinder blocks — black hair puffing to her shoulders, bright lipstick, ruffled pink dress — holding a scowly baby (him!) in nothing but a diaper, while a smaller, stubbier Agatha wearing a polka-dot playsuit stood alongside and reached up to touch the baby’s foot.
If only you could climb into photographs. If only you could take a running jump and land there, deep inside! The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine. His sister must have thought he was cute, back then, and interesting.
It was spooky that he had no memory of that moment. It was like talking in your sleep, where they tell you in the morning what you said and you ask, “I did? I said that?” and laugh at your own crazy words as if they’d come from someone else. In fact, he always thought of the baby in the photo as a whole other person — as “he,” not “I”—even though he knew better. “Why were you hanging onto his foot?” he asked now.
“I forget,” Agatha said, sounding tired.
“You don’t remember being there?”
“I remember! I remember everything! Just not why I was doing that with your foot.”
“Where was our father?”
“Maybe he was taking the picture.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“Of course I do! I know. He was taking our picture.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, too,” Thomas said. “Maybe these aren’t even us.”
“Of course they’re us. Who else would they be? I remember our trailer and our yellow mailbox, and this dirt road or driveway or something with grass and flowers in the middle. I remember this huge, enormous rainbow and it started in the road and bent all the way over our house.”
“What! Really? A rainbow?” Thomas said. He had an amazing thought. He got so excited he slid off the bed, not forgetting to be careful of the picture. “Then, Agatha!” he said. “Listen! Maybe that’s how we could find where we used to live.”
“What do you mean?”
“We could ask for the trailer with the rainbow.”
She gave him a look. He could see he’d walked into something, but he didn’t know what.
“Well, they must have maps of things like that,” he said. “Don’t they? Maps that show where the really big, really famous rainbows are?”