Who Is the Boy at the End? (Part 2)

The tall woman in the middle was claimed twice in the same week, and both families came to the library to say so.

The first family had farmed at the head of the tide for a hundred years. They brought a framed portrait, their great-grandmother in a dark dress, and set it on the table beside Rhona’s copy. Same jaw. Same heavy hair. Same way of standing with the shoulders pushed back, as if the photographer had kept them waiting.

The second family, who ran the hardware store on Main Street, brought no picture at all. What they had was a story told at every Thanksgiving since anyone could remember: their great-grandmother had packed sardines for eleven years and had been the only woman on the floor tall enough to reach the top shelf without a box.

Both were certain. Neither was lying. Rhona could hear it in the way they talked about the photograph, which was the way people talk about a relative, not about evidence.

So she stopped working on names and started working on dates.

The sign painted over the cannery door carried the name of a company that the town directories first recorded in 1911. Before that the building had belonged to a shoe firm. Then Rhona went through the burial records, which the archive keeps in a card index that Everett made himself, and found the first family’s great-grandmother, dead of pneumonia in the winter of 1908.

She didn’t telephone them. She asked them to come in, and she laid the directory page and the card side by side and let them read, and for a while nobody said anything.

It was the youngest of them, a girl of about nineteen, who worked it out. The portrait at home had never had a name written on it. It had been told, not labeled, passed hand to hand as speech for four generations. And the great-grandmother had had a sister ten years younger who did work at the cannery, and who, in the one picture the family owned of the two of them together, was very nearly her double.

“It’s still our family,” the girl said. “It’s just not her.”

Everett was in the doorway with an envelope. “You’ll want to sit down for this one,” he said. “It’s from a man who has never seen the photograph.”