In September, Grete forwarded an invitation from Nina to attend an opening at the new gallery, which Lillian and I both ignored, until one day I noticed it lying beneath a dirty plate and asked my mother how many more pictures before we were ready. Ready for what? she asked. Our next show, I said. By my count, we had at least twenty good images. Lillian smiled like I’d said something funny. She wasn’t thinking about that, she said. After her show at the Grove Street gallery, she’d realized the only way to be truly inside the process was not to have an exhibition hanging over her head. She was so happy to be with me in the darkroom, working just for the sake of making good prints. It was liberating to head out with her camera completely free of expectation or doubt. She was enjoying herself far too much to think about when or how or where she’d show her work again.

Over the past year I’d been slowly assembling a show in my mind, populated with prints my mother and I had made together. I’d imagined myself wearing one of Angie’s older sister’s dresses to the opening, pointing to a framed photograph and saying something like: She took the picture, of course, but I was with her for most of the process and . . .

So maybe in the spring, I said.

Probably not, Lillian said. She wanted to give her work a chance to breathe. When the time came, she’d know.

I’d stopped looking at my mother and was staring at a hole in the fabric of the couch. We’d had that couch for as long as I could remember. The stuffing showed through where the fabric was thin. Where the fabric wasn’t thin, it was stained, and wherever you sat on it, it was lumpy. I looked around: everything we owned was run-down and dirty and semi-broken. And nothing my mother might or might not do was going to change that.

As Angie and I passed the Bohack after school the next day, it occurred to me that I could work there. The week after we turned in our applications, the manager started us on the registers. Angie was no good at it, and only boys were allowed to stock shelves, but soon enough I was as fast as the old-timers: seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who’d been at the grocery store for years but who, like me, had started out in ninth grade by lying about being sixteen. With my earnings and my employee discount, I could afford to buy things like Cheerios and butter and bottled salad dressing. I could take home free steak or pork chops or chicken that was at its sell-by date, which Lillian was perfectly happy to pan-fry until it became a chew toy but which I learned how to properly cook, an event I informed Kaja about via telepathic message, since our pen-and-paper correspondence had dried up. Afternoon shifts meant doing homework after dinner. This cut down on darkroom time, but from the red bell-bottoms I bought with my first paycheck to a life that wasn’t all bologna and spaghetti and canned stew, the big difference between making contact sheets with Lillian and working the register at the Bohack was that one changed nothing, and the other changed everything.