Henry does, one boy, eight years old, but not a single photo at hand. Guilt bites him. Even though he hasn’t loaded minutes onto the cell phone sitting dead in the door’s side pocket, he could still use it for snapshots. Never occurred to him to do so till now. But what exactly would Junior want to remember from these last months anyway? Henry certainly doesn’t want any souvenirs from this shameful stretch. Soon as he’s back on his feet and living respectable again, the only value that memories of these hungry months might offer is a lesson in gratefulness. Like the starving-kids-in-Africa line, just a card to play if Junior ever gets whiny. But how many photos of them are there from before, back when they’d been a family? There’d been a few disposable cameras getting clicked and passed around, right after Junior was born and before the shit hit. But that’s it besides a few school photos out in the utility case, as far as he can remember. Had Michelle kept documenting the boy’s growth? And if she’d ever bothered to develop the film, where had those prints ended up?

Last December, circumstance and desperation had put all their possessions—even those dripping with sentimental value—out in the frosty yard with masking-tape price tags. Henry’d come up with the rule and stuck to it: If it didn’t have a practical function, it didn’t get a spot in the truck bed. Clothing and tools. An iron skillet, a boiling pot, cutlery, and a bundle of cooking utensils. School supplies and books. Only the most cherished and educational of Junior’s toys. The sole exception to his functionality standard had been a plain white cylinder. The urn merited a space in the diamond-plated utility case, locked away with other essentials and irreplaceables like power tools and their birth certificates. A shame that he’d never located a meaningful place to spread Papa’s ashes and pass a solemn moment. Then again, this spot would have suited Papa as fine as any.

Nothing else from the bookshelf made the cut. While a neighbor bought their TV only minutes after Henry’d set it on the driveway, all the books went untouched. Once cleared, the bookshelf he’d built reminded him of a rib cage. Got fifteen bucks for it, not even a quarter of the original cost of its lumber. The following day he loaded up and took his parents’ entire library to a secondhand-book store. Most were turned down due to all the marginalia. Fifty bucks for about five times as many books. Whatever possessions Mom and Papa had left on this earth, Henry heaved, stack after stack, into a dumpster out back.