For most of Rachel Adler’s childhood, the red scrapbook belonged to that small category of family possessions whose importance was established by the fact that nobody used them. It was never brought out after dinner, never passed around when relatives visited, never opened while somebody said, Here’s your grandmother before she had children, or Look at your father’s hair. For years it lived in the bottom drawer of a walnut cabinet beneath linen tablecloths Rose Adler saved for company, then disappeared from the drawer and surfaced again behind the counter at Joseph’s Ice Cream, standing upright in Sam Adler’s cramped office between an automobile price guide and a brown accordion file labelled PROPERTY TAX.
Rachel had been eleven or twelve when she first noticed it there. Joseph’s was busy that afternoon, the front door opening every few minutes to let in sunlight and children who stood beneath the flavour board changing their minds while their parents became impatient. The compressor behind the freezer wall shuddered periodically through the floor, and Sam was at his desk with his reading glasses low on his nose, working through a week of receipts while the women at the counter called into the office for change.
Rachel had been sent for quarters. She found the paper-wrapped roll in the desk drawer, then lingered beside the shelf, running her eyes over the red cloth cover with its looping gold letters, the little drawing of scissors, coloured paper and the ridiculous blue jar marked PASTE.
“What’s this?”
Sam finished the number he was writing before he looked up. His expression did not change when he saw where her hand was resting, but he took off his glasses and folded them against the ledger, which was enough to make Rachel move her fingers from the spine.
“Linda’s waiting for those quarters.”
Rachel held up the roll without moving toward the door. “I just want to look at it.”
Her father leaned back far enough for the chair to complain beneath him. There was no anger in his face, only the measuring look he gave customers who had decided a double scoop ought to cost the same as a single because they were regulars. “Leave it alone. Take the quarters out front.”
Sam’s mouth shifted as though he had almost smiled, but his eyes stayed on her hand.
“Whose is it?”
He put his glasses back on. “It’s family stuff, Rachel. Take the change out front.”
She stayed another few seconds, because at that age she still believed persistence could turn most adult refusals into explanations. Sam had already bent over the ledger again, but when she reached toward the scrapbook a second time his pencil stopped above the page. He did not look up.
“Don’t make me come over there.”
Rachel carried the quarters back to Linda.
She remembered that afternoon thirty years later because the scrapbook appeared in the last place she expected to find anything sentimental: a carton marked TAXES 1981–84 in the back of her father’s bedroom closet, underneath two boxes of cancelled cheques and old automobile auction sheets.
Sam had been dead three days. The funeral was still two days away, and the house had acquired the temporary disorder of a place being dismantled by people who had not yet decided which objects belonged to grief and which were simply in the way. Ben had claimed the garage, where he was assembling a pile of tools beside the back door and discovering reasons to keep things neither of them had touched in twenty years. Rachel had taken the papers because Ben hated paperwork and because their father had spent the last half of his life conducting business on envelopes, restaurant napkins, property brochures and the backs of other people’s letters.
The tax carton contained no tax returns. Beneath the scrapbook were three property deeds, two envelopes of photographs, a Joseph’s menu, an empty velvet ring box, a narrow black medal case with DAVID ADLER written on a strip of yellowing tape, and a newspaper clipping folded into a square small enough to fit beneath the palm of her hand.
Rachel left the clipping where it was and carried the scrapbook downstairs.
She put it on the kitchen table in front of her father’s chair, though she did not realize at first that she had chosen his place. The house was nearly empty now, which made ordinary sounds travel farther than they had when Sam was alive: the scrape of something heavy across the upstairs floor, Ben opening and shutting cupboard doors, the refrigerator starting up even though almost nothing remained inside except beer, mustard and half a jar of pickles. Through the window above the sink she could see a neighbour raking leaves into a blue tarp, pausing every few minutes to talk to somebody Rachel could not see.
Sam had sat at the end of this table every morning for years with coffee, toast and the Sun, answering calls from men who believed business should begin before eight because that was when Sam Adler had always begun it. Even after he stopped going into the office every day, somebody would telephone about three cars sitting in Kelowna, a commercial property on Kingsway, a landlord who needed cash, a dealer who had bought too much inventory, and Sam would listen while tapping his wedding ring against the wood. The varnish still held a shallow crescent where the ring had struck the same place thousands of times.
Rachel laid the scrapbook beside the mark.
Age had been less kind to the cover than she remembered. The red had faded irregularly, the spine had darkened almost to brown, and part of the lower edge had worn away, taking one blade of the printed scissors with it. Somebody had repaired the cover with clear tape years earlier; the adhesive had yellowed, curled and trapped dust around its edges.
The first page was empty except for four pieces of old tape and the darker rectangles they had protected from air and sunlight. Something had been there once, large enough to occupy the centre of the page, but no torn paper remained to indicate what it had been.