After that, I started watching myself like I was the star of my own nature show: “Here is the cancer victim’s daughter doing homework; here is the cancer victim’s daughter playing cards with the cancer victim’s father, who is also ill; here is the cancer victim’s daughter going for a walk.” Walking was the one thing besides studying that calmed my brain. A few blocks from St. Margaret’s was a drugstore and a diner where the girls I wasn’t making friends with went after school. A few more streets over was the coffeehouse they avoided because it kept screwy hours and its owner was a weirdo. The pariah café was all tables and chairs and lamps that looked like they’d come from yard sales. After Lillian went into remission, I did my homework there because the furniture reminded me of our Brooklyn apartment. For an hour or so between the end of St. Margaret’s and closing time at the café, it was nice to sit somewhere that wasn’t school or the guest bedroom. And that’s how I ended up meeting the best photographer no one ever heard of.

SAM DECKER: Growing up, the storefront was Anderssen’s Shoes. An Anderssen was selling shoes there when my great-grandfather won the building in a poker game, and by my time, an Anderssen was still at it. If someone from back then had told me I’d be running a café there one day, I’d have looked at him slantwise and told him it would always be Anderssen’s store on the bottom and Meemaw’s apartment on top. Every day after school, I’d rocket those stairs to her waiting for me with a slice of fresh-baked bread. Meemaw wanted a college boy. I would have been first in the family, but I decided the army was my ticket to making it famous in photography. When I was a kid, Life magazine was all glossy pics of soldiers in uniform, the storming of the beaches. I wanted to be Robert Capa the way my pals wanted to be Joe DiMaggio. For my ninth birthday, Meemaw got me a subscription so I’d stop tearing out pages at the library. I got a Kodak Brownie the year after that. By fifteen, I’d saved enough for a beat-up secondhand Contax, which was the rig Capa used at Normandy.

I was halfway through high school when Korea came. I kept hoping it’d last long enough for me to join up, and then it did. Meemaw told me over and over how Capa and all the rest went to war as photojournalists, not soldiers. At seventeen, I wasn’t about to let that hold me back, even though I should have. Turns out you can’t shoot a camera and a gun at the same time, unless you want to do a half-assed job at both.