The Picture Over My Fireplace

That is when she knocked once and walked right in.

“Tree goes right here, girls,” she said. “Ryan’s house has the best front window in town.”

Pat and Jan said hello to me. They were kind about it. Jan even hugged me, a quick soft hug that smelled like fabric softener. Pat said, “Hi, sweetie, are you working tonight?” and I said I was.

Sandra said, “Hi, Kelsey,” without really looking at me. She was already looking at the window.

“Seven feet,” she said, stretching the tape across the bottom of the glass. “Write that down, Pat. Seven feet wide, and what’s the ceiling, Ryan, eight?”

“Eight,” Ryan said from the kitchen doorway.

“So we can do a seven-and-a-half-foot tree, easy.” She turned around. “The tables go here, if we move the couch to the basement for the night. That’s twelve at the long table and the kids can eat in the kitchen.”

She had not asked if anyone could move my couch to the basement. She had not asked if there would be a long table. She was walking my living room with her notebook like she was laying out a sheet cake.

It was Jan who saw it first.

Jan had wandered over toward the fireplace, maybe to get out of Sandra’s way, maybe to warm her hands. She stood about three feet from me. She glanced up at the mantel the way you glance at anything that is hung at eye level in someone else’s house.

Then she stopped glancing and looked.

She did not say anything. She just reached over and touched Pat’s arm.

Pat turned, and followed Jan’s eyes, and pushed her glasses up her nose.

Then the two of them were standing side by side, looking up at my picture. A young blonde woman, alone, in front of a little brick house, holding up a ring of keys.

Sandra was still talking. “Stockings go on the mantel. I’ve got six. Well, I had six. I’ll have to see what’s in the storage unit.”

“Sandy,” Pat said quietly.

“What?”

“Look up.”

Sandra looked up.

I watched her see it. I watched her read it, the way you would read a sign. Her eyes went to my face in the picture, and then down to the keys, and then to the front of the house behind me, the same front she had photographed from the same sidewalk and shown to everyone at work.

Her thumb came off the tape measure button. The tape slid back into its case with a sharp little snap.

I stood by the fireplace with my arms folded. I did not say one word. I had promised Ryan I would not, and I found I did not need to.

The afternoon light was coming in through that front window she loved so much, lying right across the glass of the frame.

Nobody said anything for what was probably five seconds and felt like a full minute.

Then Jan looked at the picture, and then she looked at her sister. Jan is the youngest of the three, and I learned later that she almost never speaks first, about anything.

“Sandy,” she said. “You told the whole bakery Ryan bought this house.”

So the sisters had heard it, too. Of course they had. Mitchell is not a big town, and the grocery store is where everybody goes, and Sandra had been telling it for months.

Sandra’s face went pink, all the way up to the edge of her dark bob.