“You know what else I have,” she said, turning and darting toward a bookshelf in the back, covered in white banker’s boxes, labeled by project. She pulled a bottom one out, labeled MOST UNIQUE, and came back with a puffy photo album, the kind with plastic sleeves that you could once buy at the drugstore.

“Look!” she said, and it was all the Polaroids I had sent her during our years of letter-writing. There was Randolph, my pet corn snake, at the car wash, pretending to be a hose; there he and I were at the movies, sharing a bucket of popcorn when we saw Before Sunrise. We were in the library reading a stack of plastic-bound books; we were at a college football game, Randolph wearing a tube sock with GO GATORS written on it in marker. There were nearly thirty pictures in all. I marveled that she had kept them for so long.

“These are some of my favorite things in this whole stupid world,” she said.

“He was such a companionable snake,” I said. “He was social. It was so funny.”

“How long did he live?” she asked.

“I don’t know, actually,” I told her. “My mom drove him to the swamp and let him out when I was at school. If he learned how to hunt, he maybe could have lived for a while longer. He was ten already.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I was seventeen, I think? It was right after I got accepted to the Academy. I mean, she didn’t want to take care of him. They wouldn’t let me have him in the dorm, anyway.”

“Jesus…You know, I have always wanted to say this. On that visit your mother hit you because I wiped my feet on the mat. And I never told her it was my fault. Or you. I didn’t say anything. I was a coward. I’m sorry,” Max admitted suddenly, a tear falling down her cheek.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” I said, feeling an embarrassment so acute it knocked the wind from my chest.

“No. I’m sorry,” she insisted. “I’ve felt bad about that our entire lives. I’m so sorry that I got you in trouble like that. I didn’t know.”

“Oh, Max,” I said to her, my voice breaking. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. If it hadn’t been the mat, it would’ve been dyeing my hair, or the way I folded the sheets, or anything else.”

“I can’t believe that,” she said softly.

“It’s true,” I snapped, surprised. “I’m not lying.”

“No, I mean, I can’t believe you’ve never told me that,” she said.

“I don’t tell anybody that,” I said. “My mom had a hard life. She was damaged, and she damaged me. I have a better life. I try not to think about it.”