“Sure.” I started to round up the items that had skidded across the floor. One of them was a reddish-brown faux-leather photo album. It had rigid pages where photos were stuck beneath sticky plastic film. I glimpsed old pictures of my grandparents, and I brought it over to Joan. “Look at these,” I said.

Joan set the album on top of a stack of boxes and opened it. “I’d forgotten about these,” she said. The first page had a couple of snapshots of Grandpa as a young man, dressed in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and a pair of shorts, standing on a beach with a little boy.

“Is that my dad?” I asked.

“Yes. These are from our trip to Hawaii.” Joan pointed to an image of herself in a flowered dress, the photo faded with age. “I was pregnant with Tammy then but I didn’t know yet.”

She flipped through several pages, past photos of my dad in the ocean with Grandpa or building sandcastles with Joan.

“Dad looks just like Grandpa did back then,” I said.

“He does,” she agreed. She turned another page and paused on a picture of four men wearing fur-lined parkas on a snow-covered mountainside. “Here’s Russ and Peter and—I can’t remember their names—Joseph, I think?”

“Where is this?”

“Still Hawaii. They’re up on the mountain, Mauna Kea. I remember that day. Your grandpa knew some of the people who were working on building the observatories there. They drove us up to the site. It was so cold, and coming up from the beach, it felt like we’d traveled to another world.”

On the next page was a small square photo of the mountaintop, surrounded by clouds. “That looks like something from Instagram,” I said, leaning over to get a closer look. The colors were faded, but the perspective was dramatic—as if the photographer had been hovering above the earth and looking out on a sea of roiling mist.

“I took that one with your grandpa’s Instamatic,” Joan said. “That was a kind of camera. Everybody had them.” She closed the photo album and surveyed the mess on the floor. She picked up some of the papers and shuffled through them. “I think this is what I was looking for. It’s not exactly what I remembered, but my memory’s not what it used to be. Will you help me take these things upstairs?”

As we gathered up the box’s contents, I thought about Mel’s text. “I was wondering,” I said, “are you using your car on Saturday?”

“I don’t have any plans right now,” my grandmother said. “Do you need it?”

“I was thinking of going to San Francisco.”

“You’re welcome to use the car.”

“Thanks.”