“Viola,” said Waverly. “She was a student at the hospital. She was an orphan. She’d been in care from the age of six. She and my boy met in the cafeteria, over a bad sandwich. I said some things about her at Easter that I would give my own right arm to take back.”
“What things?”
“That she had no people,” said Waverly Linwood. “That she’d have no idea how to raise a child.”
I looked at the girl in the photograph.
“I said that to my son at my own table, in front of her, and I watched her put down her fork.” She closed the album gently. “She’d have been a wonderful mother. And she was. For eleven weeks. She sang the whole way.”
Wynne, who had been listening, came and leaned on my chair.
“Can I see my other mommy?” she asked.
Waverly turned the album round. And my daughter put one finger, very carefully, on the face of the girl in the nurse’s tunic, and said, “She looks like she’s about to laugh.”
“She was always about to laugh,” said her grandmother.
Wynne presented her project on Friday.
It was a different project by then. Mrs. Tolland had asked for two minutes at the start of class, with the door shut, and I was not there, but I am told that what she said was this: Class, last week I made a mistake. I used a word about a photograph, and the word was wrong. A family photo is any picture of people who love you. It does not have to be a happy one, or a recent one, or one with everybody still in it. And then, I am told, she said sorry to my daughter in front of everybody, which cost her something, and which I have never forgotten.
