I rolled up the door of unit 63, my hands shaking with dread, and the light fell on paintings. Dozens of them, leaned and stacked against every wall, and every single one was of the night sky over Tulsa, the moon, the stars, the dark prairie under them, painted with a tenderness I never knew my Bill possessed.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Only came at night, the young man had said, and now it made perfect sense, my Bill had been painting the night itself, and you cannot paint the night from memory in a bright room, so he came out here in the dark to sit under the real sky and capture it.
The man who handled our money for forty-three years, who I thought had not a poetic bone in him, had been a secret painter of the night, out here alone with his easel and the stars, for sixteen years.
His notebooks were full of sketches and private thoughts about light and darkness, about how the moon silvered the grass, about the exact blue of the sky just before dawn. And every painting was dated, at night, always at night.
There was a letter to me, propped on the easel.
He wrote: Old girl, I never had the words for beautiful things, so late in life I started trying to paint them instead. I was too shy to tell you, a bookkeeper who fancied himself an artist. I came at night because the night was what I wanted to paint, and because I could not bear you seeing my clumsy early tries. I got better, though, did I not. The big one on the easel is for you. It is the sky the night I asked you to marry me. Love, Bill.
I turned to the easel, and there it was, the biggest painting, the night sky thick with stars over the little park where Bill proposed to me forty-four years ago. I remembered that exact sky. He had painted it from memory and from love.
I wept in that unit surrounded by my husbands secret art, the night sky he loved, painted over and over by a man I loved more than I ever managed to say.
I could not let his work stay hidden. I brought it to a little gallery in town, and the owner was stunned by this unknown night-painter. She mounted a show.
People came and stood before Bills starry skies and were moved to tears. His work sold, and hangs in homes now, and the big one, the proposal sky, hangs over my bed, so I sleep under the stars of the night he chose me.
My daughter did not know why I drove across town. Now she knows her daddy was an artist of the night. Only at night, because the night was his muse. I framed his secret. He painted me the heavens. I look up at them every night now, right over my bed.