The Photograph Without Snow

The photograph showed their mother in a summer dress outside the old apartment building. Behind her, the pavement was dry. Daniel said it was taken on the day they left. His sister Lea said they had left in snow.

They were sorting pictures for their mother's seventieth birthday. She had asked for no party and no presents, which they had interpreted as permission to make a book. It seemed an uncomplicated gift until they reached the photograph.

Daniel remembered the removal van, its yellow doors open to the sun. Lea remembered her toes aching in wet shoes. He said she was thinking of the winter before. She said he always remembered things in better weather.

They sent the picture to their mother without explaining the argument. She replied with a heart and asked them to leave out any photograph showing her kitchen curtains.

In the next envelope Daniel found a receipt from a storage company. It was dated February. A bus ticket beside it was dated June. The two dates looked like the edges of something neither child had been told.

Their mother had moved them out of the apartment in February after the heating failed and the landlord refused to repair it. For four months they had stayed in her friend's spare room. Daniel had gone ahead with the furniture on a warm day in June. Lea, who had caught a fever in February, had been carried downstairs in the snow.

The photograph belonged to neither departure. It had been taken in August, when their mother returned to collect the last key deposit. She was wearing the dress because she had an interview that afternoon. A neighbor had taken the picture while she waited.

Their mother explained this over the phone while chopping vegetables. “I thought you remembered.”

They had remembered the rooms they slept in, the borrowed television, the smell of someone else's soap. They had not known which parts were meant to be temporary. Daniel said he was sorry. Lea asked what job their mother had interviewed for.

“Reception at the dental surgery,” she said. “I didn't get it.”

They chose the photograph for the middle of the book. Beneath it they left a blank space. At the birthday lunch their mother wrote the date in her neat handwriting, then added the neighbor's name.

Daniel expected her to say something about difficult years or how far they had come. Instead she studied the summer dress. She had forgotten its pattern, she said, and wished she still had it.

Lea passed her the next photograph. Outside the window rain had begun, ordinary weather belonging to nobody's version of the past.