“You too? Then you know what it’s like.” She shakes her head. “Those marathon flights, they were murder. All strung out on coffee and nerves. And all the same, that was the best part. It was just you and the airplane and the landscape around you, and the rest of it didn’t matter, the speeches and interviews and newspaper articles. You knew you were doing something special, something nobody else had done before, and that first flight … Sam there in the cockpit with me …” She reaches for her lemon water. Her other hand finds the calico cat that sleeps on a cushion at her feet.

I wheel around the wicker chair to prop myself on the arm, right next to her. My own glass is empty, but I’m not about to leave her for the sake of a little more bourbon. Photographs. They have an effect on people, don’t they? Show somebody a picture from some particular moment that means something to her, some person who means something, and you can just about hear the noise of suction as she’s drawn back into the past. As she becomes the person she once was. It’s a technique I’ve used before, not least on myself. I stare at her long finger, which taps on another photograph, also taken nineteen years ago in Honolulu, in which she and Mallory step from the back of some giant limousine, and he’s just turned away from her to face the camera and hasn’t yet put on that face you wear when you’re being photographed.

“That expression,” she says. “In the other ones, he’s just posing for the camera. When I remember Sam, this is what he looks like.”

I first started taking photographs when I was small, maybe eight or nine. My father gave me one of those Brownie cameras for my birthday one year, and such was my adoration for him, I accepted this present as you might accept diamonds. He showed me how to use it, and even today, when I’m messing about with cameras, I sometimes recall my father’s scent, deep in the cavities of my head, that flavor of cigarettes and shaving soap and perspiration and engine oil and whiskey that set him apart from everyone else. I hear his rumbly voice as he explains how it works, the principles of light, the mirror inside the camera that places an upside-down image on the film in the split second of the shutter’s opening and closing. Then he talks about subject and composition and shadow, and I listen so earnestly because this is my father, who knows everything, who is capable of anything.