I scoured our house for clues, looking in forbidden places—in my father’s closet and dresser drawers, the file cabinet by his desk—but there was nothing. It was as though she had never existed. Then one day, in the garage while searching for a bicycle pump, I discovered several labeled boxes sticking out from under an old packing blanket. “Documents.” “Scripts.” “Contracts.” I tugged each one out until I came to the smallest carton marked “Photographs.” A bundled pile of empty picture frames lay on top, and I put them to the side. Braving a spider web, I stripped off a crisscross of duct tape reached inside and pulled out a photo album. It was heavy, bound in dark-green cracked leather, and coated with a fine layer of beach dust. I turned it around in my hands, the sandy soot sticking to my fingers, and opened it to the first page.

There were dozens of snapshots lodged at careless angles under the plastic. My mother, a drink in her hand, wearing a floppy hat, plopped in a hammock, shielding her face; my mother, a drink in her hand, standing under a tree, pointing at her pregnant belly; my mother in a waitress uniform. I turned the page. Photographs of my parents at different functions. I’d stumbled upon buried treasure!

I rifled further into the album’s stiff pages. My mother as a teen, her hair teased into a flip. My father as a boy with his relatives in front of a sign reading “Goldstein’s Clothiers.” From my sleuthing, I’d partly assembled my parent’s history. Now, here were the missing pieces of the puzzle. I could almost picture their story playing out like a movie.

I pushed the cartons back under the blanket and gathered the album in my arms. Several photos spilled out, and as I scooped them up, one caught my eye. A Polaroid of my parents as I could never have imagined them; relaxed smiles, holding hands, squinting against the bright sunlight with a turquoise ocean washing up over their ankles. My mother’s tanned, shapely body in an orange and yellow Hawaiian print bikini. Her blond hair flowing over her shoulders as she stands with my father, twenty pounds lighter and fit in navy blue swim trunks. The tip of a green palm frond lashes out of focus in front of them. I turned the photo over. Inscribed on the back in faded blue ink were the words: “Sidney and Merilee, May 9, 1968.”

COLONY COFFEE SHOP

MORNING

MARCH 1968