I should have known that a man who has known you since you lost your first baby tooth is never going to look at you the way a stranger looks at you across a crowded diner. At thirty-nine, after four distinct heartbreaks that each left their own peculiar scar on my kitchen floor, I thought I had learned how to read the signs of a good match. My father had been saying it for years over Sunday pot roast, usually while scraping gravy off his plate with a piece of crusty bread.
He would point his butter knife at Steve and tell me that what I needed was a man who already had his character tested by time, a man who didn’t need to figure out who he was on a Saturday night. Steve was forty-eight when he came back to town after three years up north managing that timber operation in Millinocket, and the lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered, but his handshake was just as dry and firm as it had been when he used to drop by our house with a sack of fresh-caught trout.
When Steve first asked me to walk down by the old canal path on a Tuesday afternoon in April, I didn’t think of it as courtship. I thought of it as a courtesy to my father, who had been worrying himself sick over my empty apartment and my habit of keeping my bags half-packed in the hall closet.
But the air that afternoon smelled of wet mud and thawing cedar, and when Steve stopped by the rusty iron lock-gate to adjust his collar, he looked at me with a steady, grey-eyed warmth that made me forget I was wearing my old paint-splattered cardigan. He didn’t talk about my past failures or ask why none of those other men had managed to stick around past two winters. He just asked if I was still painting, and when I told him I had given up my easel after the second apartment fire, he simply said that the light in his south room was better anyway. It was a small thing, but my chest unclenched in a way it hadn’t in ten years. My father beamed like a deacon on Sunday morning when we told him we were having coffee together twice a week. Within three months, Steve was bringing over three-pound bags of coffee beans and sitting in my dad’s La-Z-Boy like he owned the springs, and by month six, we were standing in front of the justice of the peace with my dad crying into a fresh linen handkerchief that smelled of peppermint.
The wedding itself was about as simple as a marriage can get in a county where everyone knows your middle name and what kind of car your grandfather drove. I wore my mother’s dress, altered so many times the seams looked like railroad tracks, but I felt clean inside it, like the slate had finally been wiped down with a damp rag. After the ceremony at the Methodist fellowship hall, where the punch bowl was half-filled with lukewarm ginger ale and floating lime slices that had turned grey around the edges, Steve loaded the trunk of his sedan with our two modest suitcases and drove us out to his place on the edge of the ridge. His house had always smelled of paraffin and dry spruce needles, a bachelor’s house that had never quite been softened by a woman’s hand, though he kept the oak floors scrubbed until they shone like wet leather under the floor lamps.
When we walked through the back door, the grandfather clock in the hall was ticking with that slow, heavy deliberation that makes you feel every second passing through the room. I kicked off my white satin pumps right there on the braided rug because my arches were screaming from standing on the linoleum for four hours, and I told Steve I was going to wash the hairspray out of my curls before we even thought about opening the thermos of coffee Mrs. Gable had left us on the counter.
The bathroom was just off the small hallway that led to his personal study, a room my father had always called the war room because that was where Steve kept his map cases and his tax ledgers from the timber syndicate. I spent twenty minutes under the hot water trying to dissolve the bobby pins and the three layers of heavy lacquer the beautician in town had sprayed on my head like she was priming a pickup truck. When I came out, wrapped in one of his thick white waffle-weave robes that swallowed me down to my ankles, the house was so quiet I could hear the pilot light on the stove clicking in the kitchen downstairs. I didn’t go straight back to our bedroom. Instead, I noticed the door to his study was cracked open about two inches, and a thin wedge of yellow lamplight was spilling out across the scarred pine boards of the hallway. I thought he might have left the ledgers out or forgotten to lock the side window where the latch had been loose since the big windstorm back in November. I pushed the door open with the flat of my palm, expecting to see him sitting at the walnut secretary with his sleeves rolled up, sorting through the mail that had piled up while he was at the hall.
What I found wasn’t a ledger or a stack of bills. The entire wall opposite his desk, the one that used to be covered by an old forestry map of Aroostook County, had been cleared bare of everything except a grid of wooden picture frames. I stepped into the room with my bare feet making no sound on the floor, my damp hair sticking to the back of the neck of the robe, and I stood there for a long time trying to make my eyes agree with what they were seeing. There were perhaps thirty photographs pinned and framed across that wall, starting with polaroids so faded the edges were turning the color of weak tea, moving through drugstore prints from the eighties, and ending with glossy digital snapshots taken within the last two years. Every single one of them was a picture of me. There was me at seven years old sitting on the tailgate of my father’s red Dodge with a scraped knee and a dirty bandage; me at fourteen standing by the mailbox with my schoolbooks hugged against my chest like a shield; me at twenty-two crying in the gravel outside the diner after that terrible business with Dennis.
Below the frames, set on a low cedar chest that belonged to his grandmother, were little piles of things I thought I had lost forever: the blue ribbon I won for the county fair watercolor when I was twelve, three old report cards with my name written in purple ink by Sister Mary Joseph, and a chipped pottery mug I made in high school art class that I had left on my father’s back porch during the summer my mother died.
I reached out and touched the glass of the frame closest to my hand, the one from my college graduation where I looked thin and miserable because my car had broken down three miles out of town. My finger left a small, greasy smudge on the surface, and I watched the lamplight catch the oil from my skin like a fingerprint on a windowpane. The room didn’t smell like a study anymore; it smelled like an attic where old winter coats are stored in cedar chests, dry and heavy with things that had long since stopped breathing. I didn’t feel angry right away, which was the strange part that kept me standing there with my mouth slightly open. I just felt like the air had been sucked out of the hallway behind me, leaving a vacuum that made my ears pop. Steve had known me since I was six years old, running around the lumber yard with grass stains on the knees of my dungarees while he and my father discussed stumpage rights over warm soda pop.
He had watched every single one of my false starts from a front-row seat that nobody else had ever been invited to occupy. When he came back to town six months ago and looked at me across my father’s kitchen table, his eyes hadn’t been the eyes of a man meeting someone new; they were the eyes of a curator checking the inventory on an exhibit he had been tending in the dark for three decades.
“I didn’t think you’d come in here tonight,” his voice said from the doorway.
I didn’t jump. I think by that time my nerves had simply turned to wet salt. I turned my head slowly, keeping my hand flat against the wooden frame of the graduation picture, and looked at him where he stood in the shadow of the hall. He had taken off his suit jacket and his tie, and his white shirt was open at the throat, showing the grey tufts of hair on his chest that looked just like my father’s did when he came in from mowing the lower forty. He looked older than forty-eight in that dim light, his shoulders slightly rounded under the cotton broadcloth, carrying the weight of a secret he had apparently been keeping in this house since before I learned how to drive a stick shift. He didn’t look like a groom on his wedding night; he looked like a man who had finally been caught with his hand in the church collection box, trapped by the very thing he had spent years organizing and labeling.
“How long have you been keeping these, Steve?” My voice didn’t sound like mine; it sounded like an old woman shouting down a well.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the floorboards groaning under his leather shoes with that dry, familiar creak that I had heard every time he walked through our front door during my difficult twenties. “Your father gave me the first ones,” he said, and his voice was so low I had to strain to catch the words over the hum of the refrigerator downstairs. “After your mother passed, when you were twelve and getting into that wild streak with the kids down by the bridge, your dad used to bring me up here to talk sense into him. He was scared you were going to bolt like a wild heifer. He asked me to keep an eye on you, whatever it took. He said if anything ever happened to him, I was the only one who knew how your mind worked.”
I stared at him, my hand finally dropping away from the glass to my side, the waffle-weave robe feeling suddenly too heavy on my shoulders. “So I was an assignment,” I said. “A project between old men sitting on the porch with their pipes.”
“No,” Steve said, and for the first time he stepped across the threshold, his boots clicking sharply on the pine. “It wasn’t a project, Clara. Not after the first few years. By the time you came back from down south after that second bad one, you weren’t just something I was watching out for. You were the only real thing in this town that hadn’t turned into a memory.”
“And that’s why you married me?” I asked, and the bitterness finally started to rise in the back of my throat like bile after bad cider. “Because my father left instructions in his will to keep me from running off again? Because you felt like you owed him a debt for all those afternoons at the timber yard?”
“I married you because I loved you,” he said, and he stopped three feet away from me, his hands hanging open at his sides, looking down at the floor between us where my bare toes were curling against the cold grain of the wood. “I loved you when you were twenty and didn’t even know my name was anything other than your father’s friend. I loved you when you came home with your suitcases in the back of that rusted-out Ford crying your eyes out because some boy in Bangor didn’t know how to treat a woman with a brain. But I didn’t know how to tell you without sounding like an old uncle. I waited until your dad was gone because I was a coward, Clara. I waited until you were thirty-nine and tired of being hurt so I could look like the safe choice.”
The house was so quiet then I could hear the wind moving through the pine trees outside the side window, a long, sighing sound that had nothing to do with us or our marriage or the simple white dress hanging over the back of the bedroom chair down the hall. I looked at the wall again, at my own face staring back at me from ten different years, captured by a man who had been keeping score while I was busy trying to figure out who I was. The irony of it sat in my mouth like dry ash. I had spent twenty years running away from my father’s shadow, thinking I was hunting for freedom in every wrong town and every cold apartment between here and the coast, only to find out that I had walked right back into the exact same room where my life had been cataloged before it even started.
“I’m not a child you have to protect from yourself, Steve,” I said, and my voice finally found its proper pitch, steady and hard like a stone dropped in a bucket. “And I’m not my father’s legacy either. If we’re going to live in this house, those pictures don’t belong on the wall. They belong in the past where they happened.”
He didn’t argue with me. He didn’t cross his arms or give me that patronizing little smile my father used to use when he thought I was being emotional about nothing. He just looked at the wall of frames for a long, quiet moment, his grey eyes reflecting the yellow light of the lamp, and then he reached out and lifted the first one off its brass nail with a motion that was slow and deliberate. He didn’t set it down gently; he laid it face down on the top of the cedar chest with a dry, hollow thump that sounded like a door latch falling into place.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll take them down.”
We spent the next two hours in that small room without another word passing between us, working side by side in the dim light like two people dismantling a display in a store that had gone out of business. Every time one of us pulled a nail out of the plaster, it left a little grey circle of unpainted wall where the sun hadn’t touched the lath in twenty years, small white scars in the pattern of our history. We didn’t talk about my father, and we didn’t talk about the four men who came before him, and we didn’t talk about the way he had watched me grow up through the lens of a camera while I was too busy making mistakes to notice he was standing there. When the last frame was off the wall and stacked inside a cardboard carton he brought up from the cellar, the room looked smaller, almost cramped without the shadows of all those years hanging over the baseboards.
By four in the morning, the house had grown so cold the breath was starting to frost slightly against the window glass in the bedroom down the hall. We didn’t turn on the lamps again. We sat together on the edge of the mattress, neither of us touching the white dress that still lay across the chair where I had left it hours ago, listening to the floorboards settle as the temperature dropped outside. The wall in the study was empty now, just a square of pale plaster waiting for whatever color we decided to put on it when the spring thaw finally reached the ridge. Steve reached out in the dark and took my hand, his fingers dry and rough against my palm, and for the first time since we walked through the back door, his grip didn’t feel like an obligation or a promise made to a dead man in a church pew. It just felt like a man and a woman sitting in the cold, waiting for the sun to come up over the woods.
