I peeled the electrical tape off Bobbys rusty tin box at Mr. Tates kitchen table, the morning after I found the photograph in his tackle box, the one of young Bobby by a strange church next to a woman whose face someone had cut away with scissors.
Inside the tin was the missing face. A small square of photo paper, the piece cut out, kept all these years, and it was a young woman, pretty, laughing. And under it, letters, and Bobbys own account, written long ago, of the thing he never told me in forty-seven years.
Her name was Carol Ann. He married her in 1976, that church, that spring. And she died that same year, in the fall, a car on a wet road, four months a bride. Bobby was twenty-two and a widower before he was anything else, and it broke him so complete that he moved counties, took the job at Tates Hardware, and started over where no one knew, and he cut her face from the picture not out of anger but because he could not look at it and could not throw it away, the very same reason a man hides a thing behind a mantel or under a piano.
The corner of my husband I never knew was not another woman he was hiding, it was a grief he was sparing me, the fear that if I knew he had loved and buried someone before me, I would spend our marriage feeling like the second verse of a song instead of the whole of it.
Because that is what he wrote. In the letter meant for after I found the picture, Bobby wrote, Pretty, I called you Pretty every morning because Carol Ann taught me how short a morning can be, and I was never going to waste one of ours. I did not tell you because I did not want you to think you were second. You were not second. You were the rest of my life. She was the reason I knew what the rest of my life was worth.
Mr. Tate, ninety-one years old, watched me read it and said Bobby had made him keep the box since 1989, and had said only, she will need it when she is ready, not before.
I put Carol Ann back together. I taped her little cut-out face back into the photograph, and I keep it on the mantel now, next to our wedding picture, the first wife and the second, two young women who each got to be loved by the same good man. He called me Pretty for forty-seven years. Now I know it was a widowers promise, and I love him more for the grief he carried so gently that I never once felt its weight.