Nothing else is missing. Back to square one.

Clearly I’m no Sherlock Holmes.

But who says they have to be framed photos? it occurs to me suddenly. That sends me to a particular shelf on the bookcase in the basement den, where there’s a row of photo albums. Mom and Dad’s wedding. Their honeymoon. Family vacations. And then our baby books, mine and Ty’s both.

Mine is full and well maintained. Mom carefully filled out the family tree and all the details about my birth, like that I was born at 9:46 at night after eleven hours of labor, and I had excellent Apgar scores, and the first three months of my life I spent approximately three and a half hours a day crying for no good reason at all, which is just under the clinical definition of colic. She has the dates and times of all my first accomplishments: my first bath, my first smile, my first steps and words (Da-da, then dog-gy, then Ma-ma, which totally offended my mother), my first teeth, my first haircut, my first friend, where it says Sadie McIntyre in Mom’s perfect cursive. As if I really want to know that stuff.

Ty’s baby book is slimmer. By the time Ty came along, Mom had her hands full with me and no time to spend lovingly documenting every moment of his life. The second kid always gets shafted in the picture department. He’s lucky, I suppose, that he has any photos in his book at all.

It’s hard to thumb through it, but I do.

Ty as a fat and purple sleeping lump.

Ty as an adorable chubby toddler.

Ty on a camping trip, wearing Dad’s Jeep baseball hat, drinking a can of grape Fanta with a straw.

Ty petting Sunny.

Ty in bed, on Elmo sheets, with his dimpled hands clasped and his eyes closed, saying his prayers.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I skip over the pictures of Ty and me, because something in my chest twists when I look at them, all this carefully archived evidence of what we’ve lost.

His first word was Ma-ma, incidentally. Kiss-up.

It doesn’t take long for me to realize that there are photos missing in this book, too, not just places Mom was too busy to fill in, but empty spaces with the residue of double-sided tape still marking the page. But unlike the framed photos that are MIA, his baby book photos aren’t something I have memorized. I don’t know what’s gone. All I can do at this point is make an educated guess here and there and count the spots where I conclude that a photo has been removed.

Eight photos, in all. Which brings us to a grand total of ten missing photos.

I’m still no closer to understanding what’s going on here. Or why.

I hear footsteps on the floor above me. Part of me freezes for about three seconds, until I recognize the sound of Mom’s jingling keys. She has a rhythm when she gets home: open the coat closet by the door, hang up her coat. Walk to the kitchen and set down the mail in the tray on the kitchen counter. Open one of the cabinets and stick in her purse and her keys. Make herself a cup of instant coffee—or, more recently, a wine cooler or glass of wine.

I’m starting to fear for her liver.

I glance at the clock on the cable box near the basement TV. 6:07.

Mom shouldn’t be home yet.

I take the stairs two at a time. Mom yelps when I pop up at the top.

“Hey,” I say. “Get off early?”

“How was your day?” she asks me, sliding by my question.

Oh, you know, Mom, I think. Fan-freaking-tastic.

“The Lemon died,” I report. “I don’t know if she’s coming back this time. She’s still in the parking lot at Dave’s.”

“Oh no,” Mom exclaims. “How did you get home?”

“I had to get a ride with Steven.”

“Oh.” This has got to be the most loaded “oh” a person has ever uttered.

“Yeah,” I affirm. Awkward city.

Her expression softens. Mom understands breakups. She gives a stilted laugh. “That car of yours definitely has the right name, doesn’t it?”

I nod.

“If only we had some—” she starts to say, and then stops herself.

If only we had some money. To buy a new car.

I try not to scrutinize our family’s financial situation, because if I do, it becomes abundantly clear how my parents’ divorce was the key contributor to all our current cash-flow troubles, and there’s nothing I can do with that information but be mad about it. But I pay attention to numbers. I know that Ty’s death cost $10,995: the casket alone was $2,300, plus all the funeral home fees (embalming, body storage, a cost to rent the mortuary space for the wake, etc., which added up to around $3,895), plus what they charged for the body retrieval and cleanup ($400), plus the flowers ($200), plus the grave space at Wyuka ($1,300) and the cost to dig the grave ($1,000), and finally the headstone, which was an even $2,000.

Mom is a registered nurse, but she’s been on the job for less than a year, so she makes $20.25 an hour. She had a life insurance policy on both Ty and me, but because Ty’s death was a suicide, the insurance company declared that his policy was void. Dad pitched in for half the cost, of course, but he’s not rolling in cash, either. See divorce lawyers and court fees and the money he had to fork over for Mom’s nursing school after he left.

In other words, we’re broke.

See Lexie drive a clunker.

“I don’t really need a car,” I tell Mom now. “When I’m at MIT next year I’ll take the subway. Cambridge has excellent public transportation, which is safer, statistically speaking, than driving a car.”