A grandmother and granddaughter wade into a drought-low river to find the town that was flooded when the dam went in.
The summer the river dropped, the town came back.
First the church steeple, poking out of the brown water like a finger raised to ask a question. Then the roof of the feed store. By August you could walk out on the cracked mud and stand in what had been Main Street of Lower Bend, Washington, population three hundred, flooded in 1958 so the valley could have electricity.
"I want to see the house," Grandma Lou said.
"You can't walk that far."
"Then we'll go slow."
So they went slow. Nora held her grandmother's elbow and they picked their way past the skeleton of a Ford and a bathtub full of silt and a street sign that still said ELM.
The house was smaller than Grandma Lou remembered. Everything is, she said, except the things that matter. The doorframe was there, and part of the porch, and the iron hook where her father had hung his hat.
"I left something," Lou said. She knelt — Nora tried to stop her and didn't — and pushed her hand into the mud beside the step. She came up with a tin box the size of a deck of cards.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a photograph of a girl on this porch, squinting into the sun, holding a kitten up to the camera.
"My cat," Lou said. "Pepper. I was nine. I buried this so the house would remember me."
She sat on the step of a drowned house in the middle of a dry river and laughed until she cried, and Nora sat with her, and above them the steeple asked its question, and for once the river answered.
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