This is a picture I did not take

of two accomplices to a crime on Mother's Day weekend -- the first, a mom in a maroon sweatshirt and headwrap, impatient beside the getaway car (an unlicensed, rusted Ford Taurus GL) mom holding her daughter's hand, the girl no more than three years old, both of them standing beside the idling car in front of a pale yellow house in midday's sunlight, while a man kicks-down the back door and steals a family's rent-to-own television out the back; this is not a picture of the woman looking at me with a combination of fierce calculation and temerity, pulling the girl closer to her leg, the girl looking up at me with wide eyes that seemed to see nothing, the mother's nervousness charging the air between us with a kind of static, while her husband or boyfriend or brother stole a television from a family trying to carve their own way through this world, new growth of trees and ivy green and thick out back, camouflaging the thief's escape while the second accomplice stood down the street, jittery and whistling at the intersection, looking every way at once, his white sweatpants and t-shirt covering-up his crooked dark heart; this is not a picture of the whistling lookout, the camouflaged thief, the unknowing daughter, or of the kind of mother who brings a three-year old to a felony in the bright light of midday on Mother's Day weekend.