47. Lily #2
It had sat in a canister in a cigar box for two years and three months. It was a thirty-six exposure roll of black and white. She shot twenty-three frames and then stopped. I carried that roll through every town on my list and one snowbank and never once had the nerve.
Twenty-two of those frames were nothing.
I want to be honest about that, because I had built the roll up in my head into a message, and it wasn't a message.
It was a woman with a camera in the last good months of her life, photographing whatever was in front of her.
She had shot the kitchen window with the light coming through the plant on the sill.
She had shot her own feet on the linoleum, and a neighbor's cat on a fence, and the chipped corner of a mug.
She had shot the same tree in the yard four times at four different hours, working out where the light fell, because she had all the time she believed she had.
They were ordinary things, seen properly. That's the whole of what she taught me and she was still doing it in her kitchen with fourteen months to live.
Frame twenty-three is me.
I didn't know it existed. It was taken from the hallway through an open door, from behind and slightly to the left. I'm at the kitchen table with a book and my hair a disaster, mid-laugh at something that isn't in the frame, and I have no idea on earth that she is standing there.
That's the last photograph my mother ever took.
I printed it sixteen by twenty and hung it in the cabin at the height where you can't avoid it, and I've never once managed to walk past it in a hurry.
Marge's church hall thing turned out to be a gallery show.
She'd been sitting on it since the winter and wouldn't say a word.
What she had actually done was bully the parish council, borrow forty feet of pegboard from the school, and telephone a woman she went to high school with whose son-in-law owns a gallery in Milwaukee.
Then she told everybody in three counties that there was going to be an opening with a bar.
I hung thirty-one prints. The ice at the pressure ridge went up first, and then Sivertsen's hands, and then the fence post shadow forty feet long and thin as a drawn line.
Gerald took a place near the door with his new pane in him and the putty still pale.
Tank went up asleep with his nose under a door.
A plow with a yellow light on it got the middle of the long wall.
My mother's tree went up in all four of its hours.
Frame twenty-three went last, and I stood in front of it a while before I let anybody through.
Two hundred and forty people came through that hall. There are four hundred and twelve in the town.
Marge worked that bar for four hours in an apron with her own name on it and wouldn't let me carry anything heavier than a glass.
"Sit down."
"I've been sitting all week."
"You have been standing all week and I have had reports." She put a chair behind my knees, which is a thing she can do to a grown woman. "Now, about that fellow from Milwaukee. Do you want me pleasant to him, or do you want me useful?"
"What's the difference?"
"Pleasant is I ask about his drive up. Useful is I mention twice that a dealer out of Green Bay came through here in the winter and made an offer." She topped up a punch glass without looking at it. "There was no dealer out of Green Bay."
"Marge, that is an outright lie."
"I've run a diner forty years, hon. Ninety percent of it is pricing."
Earl came in a tie. He stood in front of the print of his own plow with his hands behind his back for a long time, and then told me, in the voice men keep for machinery, that I'd got the light on the wing about right.
"You closed the whole road that night," I said.
"I moved four feet of snow," Earl said. "You put it on a wall."
Then he had to go and look at some ice.
The son-in-law stayed two hours, bought nine prints for his gallery, and used the word austere about six times. I let him, because austere pays.
Then he stopped in front of the small one by the door.
"Oh, now," he said, and stopped walking. "I want that one."
It is Sacha, on the floor of this cabin, in lamplight, surrounded by seventeen identical screws, looking at a flat-pack crib the way you would look at something that had insulted your family.
"That is the only thing in this hall you cannot have."
"Name a number."
"There's no number. The model has a strict no-distribution clause." I took a drink of Marge's punch. "Also we're keeping him."
Sacha was twelve feet away pretending to look at a photograph of ice and heard every word of it, and didn't turn around, and went red to the tops of his ears.
There's one more thing and I'm only going to put it down obliquely, because I haven't been told and I'm not supposed to know.
Earl Dombrowski cannot keep a secret and has been trying to for three weeks.
Sacha has driven to Rhinelander twice on errands he described as errands.
Halvorsen asked me, in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation about iron levels, whether I had ever worn a ring on my working hand, and then looked as though he had shot himself.
And Marge asked me my ring size.
"For a knitting pattern," she said, without blinking, holding a coffee pot.
I've decided to let all four of them believe they are getting away with it.
I've found beauty in the bleakest places my whole life, and it's how I survived losing her.
I never expected to find the most beautiful thing in the middle of nowhere, with a scowling man and a dog named Tank.
But my mother always said the best photographs are the ones you never posed for. She was right about that, too.