1
They were carrying the film equipment down to the cellar: dusty, unwieldy old machines, enlargers and old rollers and cases of emulsion and fixer. There was nowhere else in the house to put it all. This place was going to fill right up as soon as the rest of the moving trucks got here, you could see it. There was about a week left to squirrel away all the stuff they’d asked Abby to send ahead first, and then the flood would come.
Moving didn’t seem to strain their marriage the way it did other people’s. They had plenty of friends who’d moved once and talked about it like they’d survived wartime: how they’d eaten on the floor for several weeks, how they’d had to buy new towels they didn’t even need, how they’d gotten so tired of all the takeout places in their new town that even now, years later, they’d shudder driving past the Long John Silver’s.
It wasn’t like that at all for Ed and Emily. Credit the late start. They’d stayed put until James and Abby were both old enough to go to college, then told them on Abby’s first Christmas back from school—James’s third—that they were going to sell the house and move someplace where they could see the seasons change.
Abby cried; her first semester at Reed had been lonely and cold. The last few weeks of waiting to come home were torture. She’d had to spend Thanksgiving in Portland; her aunt Doris was a widow who lived up on the northeast side, and they’d had chicken cordon bleu at an old card table together in the living room, which was sweet and cozy. But it made going back to the dorm later even worse. Her expanding horizons made it impossible to think about how much she missed West Covina without feeling weirdly provincial, for a Californian, but she was honest with herself about it. She missed the freeways, the clustering strip malls. She missed all of it, and now her parents were taking it away.
They’d been understanding but firm: they were sympathetic, but they had their own dreams now. New Mexico. The Rockies. Wherever the road took them. “It was how we lived when we were young,” Ed Pratt said, sizing up both kids, now grown so big. He and Emily had agreed, before setting out on the path of parenthood, that it was important to be honest with your children; they had made good on that promise. For the children, this had always been a mixed blessing.
“Come on, Ab,” James said, reaching for another slice of pizza. “You knew they were outta here as soon as they got rid of us.” He smiled; he was teasing his father, who cared too much about things.
“They’re going to sell the house!” she said.
“We’re going to sell it,” Emily Pratt said to her daughter, gently but conclusively. “Not right away, but before you graduate, Ab. And then we’re going to take half the money with us, and put the other half into an interest-bearing account in your names.”
James and Abby exchanged a glance, weighing their losses against the promise of new gains.
“We’ve had it all planned out for a while, now.”
“We’re buying an RV,” offered Ed.
“Good Lord,” said James, but Abby knew then that he was right: they’d been looking forward to this, and it was final.
She picked a few olives off her own slice of pizza with her fingernails, scooting them as far to the side as they’d go without falling off the plate.
“Well, I know you guys will be happy to be out having adventures,” she said, visibly trying so hard to be the good grown-up her parents had hoped to raise that her mother burst into tears right there in the middle of Round Table Pizza.
*
Emily’d picked up the camera equipment at a going-out-of-business sale the following October: Colima Film and Foto had been a neighborhood fixture for years, but nobody could fight the digital tide. Fotomats with their windows boarded over had briefly been a common sight in grocery store parking lots; the ones that didn’t convert to cappuccino stands got knocked down and bulldozed so quickly the eye forgot they’d ever been there in no time at all.
It all seemed to happen nearly overnight. She brought in a roll of film she’d shot in Santa Fe during the second semester of James’s sophomore year at college, where the grievances he continually aired against St. John’s had become almost comically transparent affectations. (“Too many hippies,” he said dismissively while looking out his dorm window, but Mom was young enough to recognize the music he’d turned down when she arrived: it was Meddle.) “You’ll have to pick these up by next Friday,” Kurt said: he owned the place and was usually the only person in the store. “Friday’s the last day.”