"You children amuse yourselves, but do not go out and then track in mud, Cary," she warned.
As the judge passed me, he leaned over to say, "I'll hear that fiddle yet." He winked and followed my grandparents and Uncle Jacob and Aunt Sara out of the dining room. The staff began to clear the table.
"You want to walk on the beach or just sit on the porch in the back?" Cary asked me.
I thought a moment.
"I'd like you to take me downstairs again and show me more of the pictures," I said. He smiled.
"I had a feeling you were going to ask me to do that." He signed to May, who looked excited about the idea. Cary fetched Grandpa Samuel's flashlight. We went out the rear of the house.
We didn't need the flashlight to walk around the outside of the house. The moon was fuller and brighter than ever, turning the ocean into silvery glass and making the sand glimmer like tiny pearls. I could see the horizon clearly delineated against the inky night sky in the distance.
"No wonder ancient people thought they would fall off the earth if they sailed out too far," I said. "It looks so flat." Cary nodded. I took May's hand as he led us around the corner of the house to the basement door.
"Don't let her get her dress dirty," he warned, "or there'll be hell to pay."
I signed the same to May as Cary opened the basement door. He turned on the flashlight, found the light switch for the single dangling bulb, and then beckoned us to follow. Because the shadows were so deep, we still needed the flashlight to find the cartons and sift through them.
"Easy," Cary said when he brought one off the shelf. "The dust is thick. You'll get it all over yourself."
I didn't care about that when I started to dig into the pile of pictures.
"You really do look a lot like your mother did when she was your age, Melody," Cary said. "And you're just as pretty."
I glanced at him and saw how intently he stared at me. May stood by my side as I squatted beside him. We were inches apart and the glow of the flashlight made his eyes glimmer.
"No I'm not," I said. "I could never win a beauty contest."
He laughed. "Sure you could, and I'm sure you will." "You're beginning to sound like Adam Jackson," I said.
His warm smile evaporated. "I didn't mean to," he snapped.
"I just meant that was the kind of thing he was telling me."
Cary nodded and gazed down at the pictures. "Well," he said softly, "the difference is he didn't mean it. I do."
I kept a smile to myself as I sifted through the photographs. Under the ones I had seen before, were earlier pictures of Mommy and Daddy in boats, on the beach, on swings behind the house. Uncle Jacob was in most of the pictures, too, but he always seemed to be off to the side or even a little behind Daddy and Mommy. I found their high-school graduation pictures and could see how Mommy had developed into the beautiful woman she now was.
She was photogenic: the pictures all caught her in funny, happy poses. I imagined it was Daddy who had taken the pictures, but when I turned one of them over, a picture of Mommy in a bikini posing on the beach, I saw the initials K.C. and the date.
"What does this mean?" I asked Cary. He gazed at it a moment and then smiled.
"Oh, I bet that's Kenneth Childs. Here." He pulled another album from the stack and searched through its pages. He pointed to a picture of a goodlooking young man, his arms folded across his chest, leaning against an apple tree. His light brown hair fell loosely over his forehead and lay in long strands down the sides and back of his head. He wasn't smiling. He looked serious, almost angry. "That's him. He doesn't look all that different now. He still has long hair, only he keeps it in a ponytail."
"He does?"
"Uh-huh. Sometimes he wears an earring."
"I don't believe it," I said. "Judge Childs's son?"
"Kenneth is an artist," Cary said. "He can do whatever he wants and get away with it."
I nodded, wide eyed. Cary flipped the pages until he found another picture of Kenneth Childs. In this one, he was at least sixteen or seventeen. He was taller, but his face hadn't changed all that much. He still had long hair and I thought I saw an earring in his left earlobe. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and just a vest with no shirt underneath it.
"Any more pictures of him?"
Cary shook his head.