She didn’t say anything more until I wrote this in my notes, then she pointed to a framed white T-shirt on the wall above the display. It said OPERATION DESERT STORM: VICTORY over a map of Iraq and a caricature of Saddam, a bald eagle swooping down as if to pluck his head off. Signatures were scrawled all over in black marker.

“Eva marched in DC with the returning troops,” April told me, “and I wore that shirt at the parade. I got it signed by a member of every branch of the service.”

She climbed back into the recliner and lit a fresh cigarette. I sat on the sofa beside her, notebook in my lap.

“So you come from New York,” she said.

“Yes. Have you ever been?”

“No.” April screwed up her face. “I don’t think I’d like it.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t like DC. Too busy, too many drug dealers, and then the attacks. But you understand, I’d live on a base if they’d let me, or I might be happy in Idaho.”

She fished a photo album from under the coffee table. When I edged closer on the sofa to watch her turn the pages, the German shepherd barked once. The sound went through me like a shot.

April shushed him. “He’s bored. See Eva?”

She tapped her pink-lacquered nail on some shots of Dr. Kriss as a child. The girl had her blond hair cut in a wedge and wore the same clothes as her parents: plaids of red, yellow, and green, blue jeans, army surplus coats.

The album largely showed the family outdoors, their interchangeable outfits bright against a dark-green wall of pines. From this rugged Pacific Northwestern setting, Dr. Kriss’s self-invention seemed so unlikely, ranging in whites across the tennis court, golfing at a Colorado country club.

April indicated one shot in which the father was shirtless, the sun lighting up his chest hair as he brought an ax down upon a hunk of wood. In another, the future Dr. Kriss placed a hot dog in a bun with two fingers, her face pinched with disgust.

April was always smiling, always aware of the camera. She looked like she hoped the photos would turn out well. By contrast, her husband and daughter wore expressions more common in nineteenth-century photography, before subjects knew how to put on a face, ghostly eyes gazing through the lens, jaws set, as if nervous about what will happen when the shutter blinks.

There weren’t many photos of Dr. Kriss and her father together. I saw one of the girl running away from his outstretched arms, another of her pointing a toy rifle at his back.

“She was always very headstrong,” April said as I lingered on that last photo. “By the time she was ten—you can write this in your magazine—she was smarter than the two of us put together. We were only along for the ride.”