The Picture Over My Fireplace
I had it printed and framed at the drugstore the next week. Then I could not decide where to hang it. It felt a little like bragging to put a picture of yourself over your own fireplace. So it went in the hall closet, leaning against the vacuum, and it stayed there for two years.
I met Ryan Hollis that summer at a friend’s wedding out at Lake Mitchell. He was standing by the keg trying to fix the tap with a pocketknife, and he got it working, and everybody cheered, and he turned red to the ears.
He manages the feed store on the north side of town. He knows the price of a ton of hay and a pallet of mineral tubs and a bag of calf starter off the top of his head.
He is not a big talker. He is the kind of man who would rather fix your gutter than tell you he loves you, and then one day he tells you he loves you while he is fixing the gutter, and you have to sit down on the porch step.
We dated a little over a year before he moved in. That was last fall. His lease was up, and he was spending most nights at my place anyway, and it seemed silly for him to pay rent on an apartment where he only kept his work boots.
We sat at my kitchen table and talked it through like grown people. He would pay me $600 a month. That covered a little less than half the mortgage and the utilities. I would keep the house in my name, because it was my house, and he said of course it was.
“I don’t want you ever wondering if I’m here for the house,” he told me. “I’m here for you. The house just has a better shower.”
That was a year ago. I still think about that sentence.
Sandra is 58. She has a dark bob she keeps sharp with a trim every three weeks. She works in the bakery department of the big grocery store on the south side of town, and she has worked there for eleven years.
She decorates sheet cakes. She is very good at it. She can pipe a rose in four seconds and write Happy Birthday in a script that looks like it came off a greeting card. Half the graduation cakes in Davison County come off her table.
She and Ryan’s dad divorced six years ago. It was not a kind divorce. Ryan does not talk about it much, but I know his dad remarried within the year and moved to Rapid City, and I know the house Ryan grew up in got sold.
Sandra lives in a one-bedroom apartment now, on the second floor of a building near the bypass. She has a little artificial tree she puts on an end table at Christmas. Ryan told me once it is about two feet tall.
When Ryan moved in with me, Sandra was polite to me the way some mothers are polite to the girlfriend. She brought a store-bought pie the first time she came over. She looked at my kitchen cabinets for a long time. She told Ryan the house had good bones.
She told Ryan. Not me.
I let it go. I am an ICU nurse. A woman admiring my cabinets to someone else is not going to keep me up at night.