“Ah,” Joan said. “I understand. I was very lucky that Russ’s paycheck enabled me to keep making art.”

I took a bite of my ice cream. Grandpa said Fourth of July was his favorite flavor, partly because you could only get it once a year. The rest of the year you think about it longingly, he told me.

“Would you have stopped if—if your husband hadn’t supported you?” Steph asked.

“I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have supported me,” Joan said. “There were some years when I wasn’t making any art, but that was because my children were very young and I needed to be their mother.”

“I thought that’s when you started photography,” I said.

“Yes, but not right away. When your father and Aunt Tammy were very little, I was focused on them. There wasn’t time for much else.”

“Were you upset about having to give up art?” Steph asked.

Joan smiled. “No. I wouldn’t trade that time for a permanent exhibit at MoMA. But I’m from a different generation than you two. I grew up believing I’d become a wife and mother, and even though I went to art school, I thought I’d stop all that once I had children.”

“What made you start again?” Steph asked.

“My children,” Joan said. “I began taking pictures of them because they were so expressive. I wanted to capture some of that. Russ was the one who encouraged me to show those early pictures to a photographer friend of mine, and he gave me some really good feedback. I realized I wanted to do more. So, I got a better camera and taught myself how to use it, and I set up a darkroom and learned how to make prints. It went on from there.”

“Her photos are amazing,” I said to Steph. “Have you seen them?”

“Only the ones in the house,” Steph said.

“Do you still have that catalog?” I asked Joan.

Joan nodded. “It’s in the bookcase in the living room.”

I went to find it and brought it outside. It was from a retrospective show of Joan’s work at a San Francisco gallery in 2005. I turned it toward Steph and opened it to the first image. It was a black-and-white self-portrait of my grandmother outside a ranch-style home in Boulder, Colorado, and behind her in the living room window was the blurry face of a child that I knew to be my dad. Joan was wearing a 1970s-era shirtdress with muted diagonal stripes that seemed to radiate out from the horizontal lines of the house. She looked faintly impatient. Below the photo the caption read: SELF-PORTRAIT, BOULDER, 1973.

“You look so young in this one,” I said.

“I was young,” Joan said. “In that picture I’ll be thirty-two forever.”