Nobody called her mother Patty. Her name was Patricia Ann Morin and she was Mrs. Morin to the school, Patricia at the doctor’s office, Mom in the house, and nothing at all in the stories she told about her own childhood, where she appeared only as action: I climbed. I ran. I told him.
Patty was on the back of a photograph Delia found in a shoebox in the basement closet, written in handwriting that wasn’t her mother’s. Patty at the lake, July ’83. The woman in the photograph was her mother at nineteen, sitting on a dock with her feet in the water and her head turned toward whoever held the camera, and she was laughing in a way Delia had never seen her laugh. Not the laugh she used at dinner parties, which was a policy decision. Not the laugh she gave Delia’s father, which was a receipt. This was the laugh of someone who hadn’t yet decided what her laugh would be.
Delia put the photograph on the kitchen table. Her mother picked it up, looked at it for about three seconds, and set it back down faceup, which surprised Delia. She’d expected facedown.
“Who took this?” Delia asked.
“A friend.”
“What friend?”
“Just a friend. From before.”
Before was the country her mother had emigrated from without luggage. She’d left and arrived as Patricia and never looked back and had not, as far as Delia could tell, lost anything she missed. But Patty had been left there. Patty who laughed with her whole face. Patty who sat on docks with her feet in the water and didn’t care what the photograph would look like later.
Delia never asked again. But she kept the photograph, slipped it between the pages of an atlas she never opened. And sometimes, cleaning the shelf, she’d come across it and look at the woman on the dock and think: you didn’t go anywhere. You just stopped being called.