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Julia slept heavily, I couldn’t help feeling that my every movement disturbed her. What I needed, I decided, was to get the hell out of the house. And it didn’t much matter where I went.

    I found house keys hanging on a wall rack in the kitchen. The keys dangled from a Farrell High School key ring, a maroon and gold rubber lion’s head. There were tooth marks, mine, around the edges. I slid the ring over my finger and studied the keys in my palm. I’d made a big show of leaving them behind when I moved out, one semester into my three-semester college career. I’d never had another set of keys to my parents’ house. I’d never needed them.

    I slipped them into my pocket and looked around the kitchen, debating whether or not I should leave Julia a note. Just in case she woke up in the middle of the night and felt compelled to come looking for me. I didn’t want her thinking I’d broken my promise to stay with her and gone back to my apartment. I found a pen in a kitchen drawer and scrawled a quick note on a piece of paper towel. Just that I was out, but I’d be back.

    When I tossed the note on the table, I noticed Julia had left one picture out, propped up against the cardboard box. A photo of my father at a banquet table, wearing a tuxedo. He raised a pitcher of beer with one hand and held a full glass in the other. Next to him, his elbow on my father’s shoulder, sat a blond guy, about my father’s age, holding up a beer glass, the bow-tie on his tux undone. I had no idea who he was. Both men were laughing like fools at something only they could see. The photo was dated four years before I was born, the year of my parents’ wedding. Something I couldn’t put my finger on convinced me I was looking at their wedding reception.

    I looked at my father’s hands, searching for a wedding ring, but I couldn’t see his fingers. The beer was in the way. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t place the blond guy. And it bothered me. I did have some vague memories of my parents with other adults, or at least of adult voices floating up from downstairs while I was in bed. But I couldn’t put his face with any of the voices.

    My parents did go out at night, my father pacing as my mother scrambled to feed us dinner and get herself together. I remembered Julia and me being left alone at night when we were little, sometimes until very late. I’d wait up until the headlights turned into the driveway and then I’d bolt upstairs, jump into bed, holding my breath until his voice told me his mood. Sometimes I heard only the muffled voices of my parents, barely distinguishable from each other, discussing what I figured to be all the fun they’d had out in the mysterious adult world of the night. Other times, I could hear my father yelling about something she’d done, or hadn’t done, or said, or hadn’t said. On those nights, I didn’t hear my mother’s voice at all. But for hours after the yelling was over, I could hear Julia sniffling in the room next door.

    Maybe this blond guy had been a part of my parents’ nights out. He’d been with them that one night in the photo, at least. More than that was impossible to know. I figured the tux made him for the best man, or maybe an usher. Or maybe I had it wrong and my father was the best man and the blond guy was the groom. As hard as it was to think of my father as a groom, it was even harder to imagine him as anybody’s best man. But there it was, in fading color. I studied the photo, searching for my mother, a blur in white, somewhere in the background, but she wasn’t there. It occurred to me that maybe she had taken the picture.

    That I could see, my mother bent at the waist, wearing a wedding dress, long blond hair falling, the camera to her eye, waving at my father to smile for her. I could almost hear the sarcastic cut on my mother that my father whispered to his friend. It was probably what they were laughing at in the photo. Something really witty, like