It was while lying atop the covers the next morning, mulling over Aunt Mina’s admonishment that cameras were little glass boxes, that Tugs remembered what she’d left at the park on the Fourth of July: the Kodak box and the manual with it. If she had the manual, maybe she could fix her camera.

Tugs played over the scene again in her mind. The new aluminum model, Mr. Pepper had said. Aunt Mina was wrong. Cameras were not little glass boxes. And there was an instruction manual somewhere to guide her.

Tugs smoothed out her bedspread and laid her Brownie on it. She got a butter knife from the kitchen drawer and pried the exposure lever back to its correct position. She tried turning the winding key, but the dented side was stopping things up. It wasn’t split open, though. So it wasn’t technically broken, and that was lucky. Her fingers itched to open the back and see what was inside, but she remembered Mr. Pepper’s words and resisted.

How did the picture making happen? The viewing window was a problem. Would the cracks show up in photos? Could the Brownie still take photos? Tugs studied the camera’s face, running her finger over the ridged eye of the lens opening. Even the lens cover was green, a detail that delighted her. There were two tiny glass windows down in the corner, with a tiny silver nail between them. What were they for?

The front cover must come off. Mr. Pepper hadn’t said it wouldn’t. She pulled on it cautiously but didn’t dare pry too hard. She held the cube of it between her two palms. It was cool to the touch and nearly smooth, the pine green of the surface mottled by thin lighter green lines running in random paths.

Oh, the beauty of it. This little box could capture the world. How had she not known that she needed just this very thing in her life? Just the owning of it made her forget her ornery relatives, her jaggedy grin, the way Bess had turned away from her at the park. She felt important.

Tugs was not generally one to take good care of things. Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor. The doll she’d had since she was six was missing an arm, and its tiny checked dress was torn. When she’d gotten Swisher cousin Nora’s hand-me-down bicycle last year, she’d left it on the front porch and it had been stolen in the night.

But the camera would be different, she vowed to herself. Her name had been drawn in that raffle, as if the hand of Luck herself had chosen her — Tugs Esther Button. Tugs imagined Luck as a kindly ancient grandmother, a sweeter version of her own tart wrinkly Granny, but just as feisty in her ability to turn events to her whim. And if Luck wanted her to have a green Kodak No. 2 Brownie F model, Tugs would stand up to the task.

Too bad she’d already mismanaged the box and instruction manual. There was no chance it would still be at the park two days later, what with G.O.’s family and their scavenging obsession. Couldn’t drop a Hershey’s wrapper without some Lindholm sweeping in to claim it for a wrapper sculpture or some such. They would have been over and through that park quick as a wink, picking up trash and claiming anything left behind. No such thing as a lost and found department in a town inhabited by a clan of finders keepers. And even if they did find the manual, G.O. certainly wouldn’t give it to her.