I used to play a game with myself, looking for the perfect parents. Living at Disney, I had a lot of people to choose from. In due course, I found a gorgeous mother and a debonair father and named them Isabel and Peter. Isabel looked like a ballet dancer, flawless ivory skin, long neck, turned-out feet. Peter had salt-and-pepper hair and large clear eyes. Their children would surely have had all the toys, dolls, stickers, dresses that I coveted. For the next several years, whenever I was feeling inferior or depressed, I envisioned myself as their daughter. Over time, I forgot exactly how Isabel and Peter looked and how they spoke. But I held on to the idea of them—the opposite of my own demoralized parents. By the time my mother was thirty, long hours in the Florida sun had coarsened her face. “Your skin’s too smooth,” she’d say to me. “Get away, I can’t bear to look at you.”

The memory of deprivations sometimes remains dormant and you might think you are past it. But it’s actually just below the surface, ready to rear its head with the slightest provocation.

Meeting the Straubs reminded me of my game, because I’d always felt certain that Isabel and Peter were architects too.

The front door opened downstairs, and I heard footsteps. A minute later I met the Straubs in the stair hall, having deposited my camera in its case on the hall bench. I sensed that they wouldn’t understand why I was still taking photos. Many people don’t realize that I use my camera to interpret the world around me. It’s another set of eyes.

Fritz had a beet-red face and smelled of alcohol. Amelia stumbled toward me and almost fell into my arms. It appeared that she’d recently applied lipstick and had done so poorly, as I could see lipstick outside the lines of her lips, like a clown, and on her teeth. The rest of her makeup had worn off.

“Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?” She belted out the first lines of the Tanya Tucker song. “Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?”

Faint bells sounded in the distance. How unlikely that Amelia would know that song well enough to sing it to me. It was a sign of our strong connection. My mother had given me the first name Delta to go with my last name, Dawn—her tribute to Tanya Tucker. I wasn’t proud of the name, but I couldn’t separate myself from it. And Amelia singing it to me, it was like she understood all that. She understood me. She recognized me.