She rounds us up, nags us together for a picture none of us wants but her. This is her custom, her right as she would say if pressed on the point.
And so we gather, arrange ourselves in a row of sorts, the men with their hands fidgeting at their sides. The women hunching and shrugging, making themselves look small.
No one wants this picture. Not this one or the last. No one but her. And we will never see it, because no one will ask. There are stacks of albums filling several shelves and when she is gone, none of us will claim them. Someone, one of the daughters, will box them up for trash.
One family, undocumented, unburdened with her negatives, with her 4 x 6s of gatherings we’d rather not revisit.
Or maybe we will keep them, and take to them with scissors, putting women with women instead of the men they chose when they were too young to know the difference. And maybe then, after all the adjustments, after the paste jar is empty and our hands are blistered from cutting, maybe then we will pass them around, these photos as we would have liked them.
A grandmother with a camera has no right to everything.
