Chapter 39: The Christening
Eleven days later there was an album with thirty-one photographs in it.
I know it was eleven days because I went back on the second Thursday and the album was at the top.
Saint Bede's is a small church on the north side with a car park behind it and a hedge along the road.
I have never been inside it.
I have seen thirty-one photographs of the inside of it.
The child's name is Rowan.
Rowan Dean Mercer, which was written on a card propped against a vase of white flowers in photograph three. The card was printed, not handwritten.
He was about five months old.
He is asleep in eleven of the thirty-one and crying in two.
In photograph seven the priest is holding him over the font with one hand under his head.
The font is stone and there is a brass lid hinged back against the wall.
Somebody had put a folded white towel on the rim of it.
Somebody always does.
I looked at every one of them and I counted things, because that is what I do with a set of documents.
Twenty-two adults visible across the album.
Four children. One dog outside on the grass in photograph thirty.
Renata is in nine of them.
She had gone completely grey and had stopped colouring it and it suited her.
She is wearing a camel coat in six photographs and holding it over her arm in three, so the day turned warm.
In photograph fourteen she is holding the baby and looking at the camera and her mouth is open, mid-word.
I do not know what word.
Dean is in eight.
He is holding a car seat in two of them, by the handle, in the way that pulls a shoulder down.
Photograph nineteen is Bree and the baby and a woman I did not recognise.
Bree's left arm is under the child and her right hand is on his chest, flat.
On her right wrist there is a gold bangle.
It is four millimetres wide, rounded on the outside, flat on the inside, with a hinge and a safety catch.
There is a shallow dent on it about two centimetres from the catch.
My mother put that dent in it in a car park in nineteen ninety-something, catching it on a door frame with her hands full.
She told me about the dent more often than she told me about anything else she owned, because she was annoyed about it for twenty years.
You cannot see a two-centimetre dent in a photograph on a public library terminal.
I know it is there.
That is a different sentence from seeing it and I am going to keep the two apart.
What I could see was a gold bangle on my cousin's right wrist, in a church, under a child.
I looked at photograph nineteen for a long time and then I went on to twenty.
Photograph twenty-six is the car park.
It was taken from the church steps, looking down, and it is a bad photograph. Somebody took it to get the hedge and the sky.
There are nine cars in it. Seven are in focus.
Fourth from the left is a dark blue estate.
It is parked nose in, so the back of it faces the camera, and the rear window is at the centre of the frame at about a third height.
On the glass, on the lower left of the rear window, there is a pale rectangle.
A university parking sticker, sun-bleached, applied to the inside of the glass in a September I remember, by me, with my thumbnail flattening the corner.
I bought that car with eleven thousand dollars and a loan I finished paying in my second year of marriage.
It is a 2011 estate wagon and it appears in a police report I have read forty times.
I did not zoom in on photograph twenty-six.
The terminal had a zoom.
I did not use it.
I want that on the record: I sat in a public library and did not use a zoom function, and it took me about four seconds to decide, and those four seconds were the hardest work I did that month.
Then I went to photograph twenty-seven, which is a table with sandwiches on it. There were also two bowls of crisps and a stack of paper plates.
There were four minutes left on the timer.
I closed the session and put the chair under.
Outside it had started raining while I was in there.
I walked to Cranmore in it because I had not brought the coat I did not buy.
I signed in at 6:12, wet through, and the clipboard pen went straight through the paper. Ms. Prine looked at me and asked if I wanted a towel.
I said, “Yes. Thank you.”
That is the only thing I said out loud that evening.