Steph was paging through the catalog, looking at pictures of my dad as a kid running through the sprinklers, Grandpa setting up a telescope in the backyard or flipping a steak on the grill, Aunt Tammy with a scowl on her face at the swimming pool.

“These are great,” Steph said. “They’re definitely expressive. But the pictures are about more than capturing that, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Joan said. “What do you think they’re about? I’m curious.”

“They’re about . . . family,” Steph said. “Whatever that means.”

“In a particular context,” Joan said.

“Middle-class, white picket fences,” Steph said.

Joan was nodding.

“It’s very subtle,” Steph said. “The ways you’re pushing back against that.”

I was sitting across from her as she turned the pages of the catalog, so I saw the images go by upside down. The double exposure of Dad and Aunt Tammy that was also framed in the guest room. A self-portrait of Joan on a foggy beach. Aunt Tammy high on a swing set, her skirt like a kite. Steph flipped past an Asian woman in something like a spotlight, her eyes looking straight at the camera, and just as she turned the page, I recognized my mother.

Had I forgotten that picture existed? I almost reached out to make Steph go back, but she had already moved forward to photos of people I didn’t know. Another Asian woman, this one with teased hair in an eighties power suit on a street littered with firecrackers; an old white man who seemed to be floating above a box; and then the paintings. The early ones, from the 1960s, were entirely abstract, but they began to transform in the nineties into the semi-figurative landscapes she made in the early 2000s.

“Why did you switch from photos to painting landscapes?” Steph asked. “They’re so different.”

“I see them as a very natural progression, actually,” Joan said.

“What do you mean?” Steph asked.