The blonde girl's face squinted up at me from the bottom of a bedside table's drawer, looking as if she were as surprised to be found as I was to unearth her. My mother and I were decluttering her bedroom down to its cracks and corners. That meant emptying the places where she'd stuffed items that she didn't want to lose but may have been comfortable forgetting for a while. Objects like this faded photo, its scalloped edges framing the figure of a child I'd never seen before, standing in some yard I had never visited and grinning into the sunshine.
I asked my mother who it was, and she stopped whatever she was doing to peer at the picture. "That's your cousin," she said, blithely as she would have identified an obsolete utensil – that goes there, you can throw that out – as opposed to a whole flesh-and-blood relative I'd never met.
