Page 70 of Knocked Up

I got it open.

It was my mother.

June Reeves on the sidewalk on Federal in front of a storefront with the lettering half done, arms crossed, squinting into the sun. She was in a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled. Behind her in the window was the ghost of a man on a ladder holding a brush. It was 1998, the morning she opened.

I've never seen it in my life.

Plain wood frame. In the bottom corner there should have been a bloom of water damage the size of my hand. There was my mother's boot and the edge of the curb, put back.

"Where," I said, and it came out wrong. I started again. "Where was this?"

"Storage room. Third shelf. There's a box marked 2004 with rabies certificates in it. It isn't 2004 and they aren't rabies certificates." He had his hands flat on the table. "It got wet at some point. Everything on the bottom is gone. That was near the top."

"You went in the storage room."

"I didn't reorganize it. Clause four. I took one photograph out and put the box back the way it was. I can show you exactly where it goes."

"That's not what I'm…"

"I know," he said.

"There's a place on Broadway that does that. How long did they…"

"Six weeks. They call you when the scan's done. You go in and look at it on a screen and tell them if it's right. I didn't know if it was right. I've never seen her." He turned his cup a quarter turn. "In the first one they'd taken the squint out and it looked like somebody else."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"They took the squint out."

"They smooth it. They do that." He was looking at the table. "I told them to put it back."

Then it was his turn. By then my hands were not good.

It is a four-by-six in a cheap black frame from the pharmacy on Thirty-Eighth, because I did not have six weeks and a place on Broadway. I had a shoebox and a Sunday.

He got the paper off and went still.

I've seen this man stand in his net with eighteen thousand people screaming and not move. That is not what this was. This was a man who had been talking a second ago.

It is the back booth at Walt's. An old man in a white apron with his forearms on the table, laughing at something with his eyes shut. Across from him a twenty-one-year-old with a plate of eggs and his hair too long and a bruise on his cheekbone. He was half turned toward the camera because somebody had said his name.

I took it in August, on a disposable camera, because it was 2015 and I was a broke vet student. That is what I had. I got them developed at a drugstore in Fort Collins. There were pictures of a dog on the roll and one of these.

He did not pick it up. He put one finger on the corner of the frame and moved it an inch toward himself. He left it there.

I counted thirty seconds. At about twenty I started to genuinely wonder. At thirty-one I said, "Beckett," and he said, "Yeah," in a voice like a door in another room. I said, "You're not breathing." He said, "I am."

"You went white."

"I'm all right." He had not looked up. "That's the booth. Third from the register. He sat on that side because he could see the door and the kitchen at the same time."

"I know."

"That's my second year of junior."

"It's August," I said. "You'd been hit in the face by a defenseman from Brandon. You told me it was a puck and it was not a puck."

"It was a puck."