So it was easy picking my major and later deciding to get my master’s in education. Because without all the adults sticking with me, believing in me, and punishing me, too, I might have followed a very different path. Once I was focused, school came easily to me, due much in part to my love of lists and notes and calendars of all kinds. I look again at the picture, remember the proud tautness of Dad’s shoulders, so convinced that I would take my education and travel the world. He wanted me far away from Whittier, refusing to ever see how much this town had saved me. I did have friends who left to teach in international schools all over the world, and I could have gone that route, I suppose, but there was a big part of me that yearned to give something back to the kids in Whittier.

I shake my head, blink rapidly. That was all a long time ago, I tell myself.

In some ways I can feel the years that have passed since this photo was taken in the texture of the skin across my arms, the looseness around my eyes, because time itself has changed me even if I don’t recall its passing. In other ways, it shocks me to face the truth. The present is liquid, flowing from moment to moment, and I am a raft, drifting with the current, not always connected to the minutes or hours, days and weeks attached to the passing of time, until I stare at a photo like this and am forced to acknowledge how much I have missed. I press my arm against my eyes, wait for the burning to fade before looking at the picture again.

In the picture, I’m wearing a black cap and gown, and Dad has his arm tight around me, his bearded face split in two by his grin. I trace the outline of the two of us with one finger. This was taken right before the ceremony, before my mother’s untimely arrival, before I broke the news to Dad about my job in Whittier, and before Tate Dunn walked back into my life.

No, Claire, you can’t come back to Whittier. Dad had touched my face like I was delicate and made of glass, a sad wrinkle in his forehead. It isn’t the right place for you. It’s too small, honey. I think if I’d been able to afford something better for Alice, maybe things would have been different.

I’d put my hand on his arm, made him look me in the eye, because I was both angry and saddened by his words. I’m not her. I’m nothing like her.

The memory fades and I focus on returning the picture back to where it belongs. That must have been what I was doing in the first place, certainly not dredging up old memories that hurt.