After a few months, the letters turned into something larger.
With Joan’s recipe cards and a box of old snapshots, I began putting together a book for my children, called Where You Come From.
It has Marie’s bakery cookies in it, and her handwriting, and David’s fishing stories, spelled correctly for once.
Grace designed the cover.
Ben added a chapter on trout.
On the last Sunday of April, I found a roll of tape in a drawer and the two halves of the photograph on my kitchen counter.
I had kept them apart for seven months, as if putting them together might break something.
That afternoon, with David watching from the corner chair and holding his mug by its crooked little finger, I laid them edge to edge.
I pressed a strip of tape along the back.
The Ferris wheel closed.
The girl laughed at the boy, and the boy laughed at the camera, and the jagged line down the middle faded into the light.
