Aunt Linda came.

Yes.

Mark came.

Yes.

She put the purple bead in her box and said, then this picture is from before, and I asked, before what, and she shrugged and said, before yesterday, and I said, that works, because it did, because she had just done in one sentence the thing I had been failing to do for weeks, which was to stop reading the photograph as a record of who had failed to come and start reading it as a picture from before the people who actually came, came.

We carried it to the kitchen and put it on the refrigerator beneath her crayon drawing of four people and a crooked house and a purple crown floating above the roof, and she stepped back and said, put it under, so the crown can watch it, and then she said, Mom, I am going to keep the crown, but I am done waiting by the door.