“Yes, thank you.”
“Holly, I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t answer. It wasn’t to punish him. I truly couldn’t tell whether I was hearing an apology for what he’d done sixty-one years ago or for what he’d done to me over three weeks.
I set the photograph on the desk beside the blue ribbon. I wanted it out of my hands while I decided what it meant. Then I walked out with Helen.
Four days later a letter arrived in a plain white envelope.
He apologized for the salon, for the silence, for the photographs, for the lie of leaving things out. He did not ask me to forgive him. He didn’t ask to see me again.
Inside was the photograph, with my mother’s card tucked behind it.
I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the girl for a long time. She wasn’t ugly. I saw that now, with my glasses on and sixty-one years of distance. She was frightened, and nobody in that room had put a hand on her shoulder.
Maya found me there when she came by with groceries. She set down the bags.
“Grandma? What’s wrong?”
I slid the photograph across the table. “That’s me at seventeen.”
She studied it, then looked up with a wet, fierce expression. “You had beautiful eyes.”
I wiped my cheek with my sleeve. “That’s what your grandfather always said.”
She squeezed my shoulder. For once, I didn’t turn the picture facedown.
A week later I called Arthur.
“Did you ever wonder what happened to me after that day?” I asked.
“Not until years later,” he admitted. “And then I couldn’t stop.”
“I spent most of my life trying to fix something that was never broken.”
“I’m sorry, Holly.”
“I believe you.” I watched the cat wash a paw on the windowsill. “But I don’t know if I can trust you again.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Then we’ll leave it there for now.”
He was quiet. “For now is more than I deserve.”
I didn’t tell him it was all right, because it wasn’t yet. Maybe someday.
That evening I took down the frame from the hallway shelf, a picture Maya had snapped last June, me laughing in the garden with dirt on my knees. I set the 1965 photograph in a second frame and stood the two side by side.
In the new one, my mustache was plain as day. In the old one, the girl was holding her breath.
Sixty-one years apart, and they were the same face.
I didn’t reach for my powder. I straightened both frames until they sat level, and I went to the kitchen to put on the kettle.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real-life themes. Names, characters, places and events are fictionalized, and any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental. Images are for illustration purposes only.
