Mom keeps a wicker basket filled with photographs in her bedroom. When she is on the phone and I’m bored, I spend hours rifling through each envelope filled with pictures. I investigate the past, studying the details of every situation and event. Multiple copies of the same exact picture with only the slightest variations. Countless weddings, baptisms and other sacraments. My dad and uncles in an array of standard military uniforms. My sister, Judy and I taking turns on a tricycle. I hold thin strips of negatives up to the light, hoping for secrets not yet revealed.

I’m always drawn to that frayed black and white print of my father as a teenager. The one where he’s pointing a shotgun at an older man’s head. I didn’t recognize the other person. Mom said it was Daddy’s favorite uncle. He’s dead now, but not because my father killed him. It’s hard to imagine Dad having a favorite anything.

There’s also that photo of Dad and Aunt Joan on New Year’s Eve. Propped up next to each other at a party, in front of the little white Christmas tree on top of the TV set in my parents’ living room. A hand pushes their heads together so they kiss. I can tell just by looking at my father’s face, he is drunk. I hate this picture. How could my mother let them act that way?

Mom swears there’s nothing to worry about.

“Honey, there isn’t another woman in this world stupid enough to put up with your father’s bullshit. I couldn’t give him away if I tried.”

I fold the photo in half and bury it beneath the others.

I search for three nearly identical snapshots of my cousins, Michael Kevin, Jeanne Marie and Dennis, taken a few years before I was born. Toddlers of varying ages, dressed only in undershirts and briefs, loosely supervised on the roof of the apartment building in Manhattan where our family live. Where our mothers hung laundry to dry, smoked and gossiped while the men were at work. After supper, they all returned to the roof to relax and enjoy a few too many beers. Wearing sunglasses and holding cans of Schaefer shorties, each of my cousins smile for the camera, as if they are in on the joke.

I brought the picture of Jeanne Marie to school once when I was about seven years old. I showed it to all my friends in the fourth grade schoolyard and told them it was me. I wanted to be that child holding a beer can. Drinking looked like so much fun.

The last photograph, I find myself staring at the longest. It’s from two summers ago, when I was around eight years old. I’m sitting cross-legged on a towel at low tide in Edgewater Park. We were visiting my cousins at their house on the Bronx side of the Long Island Sound. I’m dressed in a yellow and white bathing suit that no longer fits me. I insist on wearing it because I want this place to be the beach, but it’s not. There is sand, yes. Sort of. It’s moreso a combination of mud, crushed bricks and glass. Shattered beer bottles, garbage and the occasional dead fish litter the shore. Empty, dark blue mussel shells slice into the bottom of my feet. Ropes of seaweed wrap around my legs when I’m in the water. I stand up in the water and scream. The other kids tease me because I can’t swim. They sing the Baby, Baby. Stick your Head in Gravy song.

All the grown-ups, except for my mother are drunk, but she is well on her way. She’s angry with my father because he went up the road with some of the other men to play cards and hasn’t come back yet. She drinks at him. It’s scary. He always ruins everything.

In this awful picture, I am eating a hamburger. There’s ketchup on my cheek and chin, a can of Shasta soda between my legs. My pale, white belly flops over my bikini bloomers. I’m getting fat, and I don’t know how to stop it. I can’t imagine why anyone would take this photo. It looks like I’m about to cry.

Today is the day I separate this particular memory from the others in the pile. I tear the picture into small pieces and those pieces into tiny ones. I flush them all down the toilet and try to pretend I’m someone else.