Because behind where a photo should’ve gone, Dwight had tucked away the mat board, and he’d written on the back of it.
Fifty-two lines. One a week for a year, in pencil, in that cramped print of his, dated in the margin.
They are not love letters. My husband could not have written a love letter at gunpoint. They are one line each about something I did that week that he never said out loud.
March: she sang in the kitchen and didn’t know I was on the porch. May: she gave the Nunley boy gas money and told me it was for stamps. August: she cried at the church thing and fixed her face in the truck mirror and walked back in.
Fifty-two weeks of a man watching me and writing it down where I’d never see it.
And taped in the corner of that mat board was a claim ticket from a photo restoration outfit up in Muscle Shoals.
There’s exactly one picture of the two of us from our wedding day. His cousin took it on a camera that wasn’t loaded right, and it came out half-burned, and my face is a white smear, and we have laughed about it for twenty-two years and I have grieved over it privately for about the same amount of time.
He took it up there in January. Paid eighty dollars he did not tell me about. The ticket says ready for pickup, and the date on it is nine days after he died.
The frame was for it. The frame was empty because the picture wasn’t finished yet, and he did not have one single word in him to explain that, so he handed me an empty frame and let me be disgusted with him.
At the bottom of the mat board, under all fifty-two lines:
“Sherry — I know it looks like nothing. It ain’t finished. Neither am I. Hang it up anyway and I’ll fill it.”
I drove to Muscle Shoals on a Thursday with that ticket in my purse.
The woman who runs it is named Priscilla and she went in the back and came out with an envelope and said she had been keeping it because the number on file had been disconnected.
My face is there. Both our faces. Twenty-six years old, in front of a church we don’t go to anymore, and he is looking at me instead of the camera the way he did his whole life when he thought I was busy.
It’s in the frame. Scratched glass and all — I would not let the shop replace it.
It hangs in the hall where I pass it about forty times a day. The mat board’s behind the photograph, face-in, where it belongs.
Fifty-two weeks he watched me and never said a word of it. A dollar frame from a thrift store. I have never in my life been given anything like it.