Excerpt from “I Do Not Recall,” my non-fiction story in Piece by Piece:

I stop as I am sifting through a box of old photographs. Sitting cross-legged in my parents’ library, I peer at the photo, stuck on my father’s face.

He’s laughing, hard enough that he’s not entirely in focus. I recognize him, but I can’t place him. The other two young men – they look to be Dad’s age – are laughing, too. The three look posed, but then something happened, maybe something was said, and they all broke up, just as the shutter closed.

The discovery of the photograph was accidental. It was July of 2023. I was twenty-four going on twenty-five, living at home, and still reeling from my two years of struggling to become a teacher. I was unemployed and in a moment of either curiosity or boredom, I decided to go through the boxes and boxes of family photos.

By the time I found this picture, I had been through over a hundred photographs. This is the one that stopped me. I had never seen it before. I put it to the side. There was a story here and now I needed to find it. I found other photographs that offered clues: more of my father. The other young men. My grandmother in front of the Supreme Court. It clicks: this series must have been from when Grandma and Grandpa came to visit Dad during his clerkship for Chief Justice Warren Burger. A story I have never heard. A story my father never told.

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