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with his letter.

Chapter 10
     
    My parents decided that we needed to go on a family vacation during the summer of 1986. It was our last summer together as a family before Valencia and Van went off to college. So in mid-June we took the camper and headed to Glacier National Park. My dad was really excited and talked more than I remember him talking before or since. He was like a brand-new person, sharing trivia with us non-stop the whole way there.
    “Do you know that the glaciers are disappearing? They are drying right up. You’ll all be lucky if there are any left by the time you bring your own kids here so take a hell of a lot of pictures! Your mother and me came here back when you were babies, Valencia and Van. You probably don’t even remember that, do you? We had a good time, right, Patricia?”
    When he wasn’t talking, he was playing a cassette tape of old music with a horrid song on it called Patricia , singing along, trying to make my mother smile.
    That was a funny summer. Funny strange, I mean. There were times I saw my family, my parents especially, in a way I hadn’t before and never would again. They seemed like a T.V. family. Like the Keatons from Family Ties , maybe. It’s funny how even then as a child I looked at our family in terms of they instead of we, how I saw myself as an insignificant filler character, like the way the little blonde sister fit in beside Alex and Mallory.
    What I did not know then was that my mother had just ended a nine-year affair with a neighbor. She and my father had been about to call it quits, but she changed her mind and decided to try to work things out with him. And he was so happy that summer because of this glimmer of hope of my mom loving him again. Now it all makes sense. But at the time I thought he was just happy to be with all of us and to be in that camper going to look at glaciers.
    I wasn’t even sure what a glacier was and was having a really hard time picturing it.
    “A glacier is a big hunk of snow,” Valencia told me.
    We lived in Wisconsin where there was snow all the time. I couldn’t understand why we would want to see more snow in June when it was finally all gone, but I wasn’t about to argue as long as everyone seemed to be having a good time.
    My dad kept his word and took roll after roll of film. Stupid pictures that made my mother angry. “Stop taking pictures of the car, Roger. It costs money to develop those.” Everyone was concerned about money in the 80’s. But for once he ignored her nagging and the camera kept snapping away, freezing my brother in a goofy cowboy hat and my sister in her favorite tangerine sundress. There were pictures of my mother taken by the fire after we kids had gone to sleep, her face less tight than usual, dark, barely visible against the lapping orange flames.
    “Say cheeseburger!” was his catchphrase on that trip. We all said cheeseburger a thousand times it seemed.
    “Van inherited your dorkiness,” Valencia told him when Van put on a filthy pirate style eye patch he’d had the good fortune to find on the floor of a truck stop bathroom in Bismarck. My dad beamed when he heard this and my mom bristled silently in her seat.
    We pulled over again and again. Every hill of wild flowers and every mountain was a notable backdrop. Any memory was worth saving.
    “Let’s get one by this historical marker. You too, Patricia. Take your ponytail out. You look real nice. Van, ask those Japs to take a picture of all of us. No, no, keep your eye patch on. It’s funny.”
    I inherited just his desperation. He was trying to capture my mother but did not know we were all slipping away.
    When he got home he took the film to a store downtown that only developed pictures and sold film. I don’t know if they even make stores like that anymore. He got twenty-five of the photos turned into big, matted eyesores in rustic wood frames. These frames were so rustic that they could not be dusted without the duster getting a