It is possible they are the only Americans not to watch Vincent Kahn walk on the moon—despite the proximity of a black-and-white television, a Panasonic rolled out for the occasion, despite the gasping and weeping around it. She and her son remain where they sit in the unnamed restaurant. Its floor is dirt, its tables are plastic, the fourth wall at their backs a retractable fence. The family in charge ferries rice and juice and deep-fried plantains from the back rooms where they live, pushing aside a half-parted wood curtain. Behind this sits an unmade bed on the tile, at the foot a toddler’s discarded sock.
What is said about her, not often with warmth, is that her dress is poor but her teeth are rich. Her son is nine years old, and he might be the only American child who does not know Vincent Kahn’s name. He has swum that day, in the middle of July, in a tributary of the Amazon, in the Morona-Santiago province of Ecuador. He wears saddle shoes, tan and white, and so does his mother. If his chin drifts over his shoulder toward the noise, she snaps it back with her voice. On the table between them lie small squares of paper, adjectives and verbs in tight cursive, and the things he has insisted she buy him, decks of cards and glass beads. The major events in his life have been the violence of new molars in his mouth, the loud chirp of pale geckos in the windows at night.
As the room becomes the applause, she speaks his name, Wright Fern, and touches his face. Because she has the posture of a dancer, a center of gravity that draws all to it, in the second after it seems his cheek has come to her palm, and not the other way around.
The sounds now are minor, the clicks of saliva in open mouths, sentences that only get started. Back in the country they left, boys about to be deployed, already in uniform, lean on the floral arms of childhood couches to see Vincent Kahn cross the virgin surface. Nurses snap on the wall-mounted TVs and usher the dying awake.
His mother is the only person he has ever really known, and he will grow up largely without any photos of her, at least who she was before this. In the second-to-last letter Fay writes to her parents, three years from now, she’ll ask that they destroy these images, and they will, along with the request.