I turned the key in the lock of unit 214 and rolled up the door, my hands shaking, and the light fell on something I never could have guessed. Paintings. Dozens of them, hung and stacked and leaning against every wall. And every single one was of me.
I put my hand over my mouth.
My husband, the man who narrated a trip to Ace Hardware, the least artistic soul I ever knew, or so I believed, had been secretly painting for fourteen years. And his only subject, in canvas after canvas, was his wife.
There I was at twenty-five, at forty, at sixty, painted from our old photographs, and there I was at the kitchen sink and asleep in my chair and laughing at some joke, moments he had memorized and carried out to this quiet room to turn into paintings, so he would never lose a single version of me.
He had taken up painting in secret, I learned from a note, after the doctor first warned him his heart was weak, back in 2011. He had told no one. He had rented this unit and taught himself to paint, badly at first, the early ones were rough, and then better and better, all so that if he went first, I would know exactly how he saw me for forty-four years.
The note read: Ruthie, I was never good with words for the big things, so I stopped trying to say them and started trying to paint them. This is how I have seen you every day of our life. Beautiful. Every age. Every morning. I painted you so you could see yourself the way I always did.
The almost always he came with. On the wall by the door was a small painting, different from the rest, of our grandson at an easel beside my husband. The boy, it turned out, was the only one who knew. He had come to paint with his grandpa, keeping the secret, the two of them out here making art no one else would see until now.
I sat in the middle of that room, surrounded by forty-four years of myself seen through the eyes of the man who loved me, and I wept like I have never wept.
I did not sell one painting. I brought them home. They hang all through the house now, me at every age, so that everywhere I turn, I see myself the way my husband saw me. It is the greatest gift anyone ever gave me, to see yourself, at seventy, through the eyes of a man who found you beautiful for forty-four years.
Our grandson paints on his own now, and says his grandpa taught him everything. The storage unit held no other woman. It held only me, over and over, loved and painted in secret by a man who could not say it, so he showed it, sixty-seven dollars a month, for fourteen quiet years.