DUMP.
It was sitting next to the garbage cans. Waiting to go out to the curb.
The tape on one corner had come loose. The flap was bent up a little. I could see inside.
It was full of photographs. Framed ones. Loose ones. And on top, a big white leather photo album with gold letters on the cover.
Vanessa & Mark. June 14, 2008.
A wedding album.
I stood there in the garage looking at it.
I don’t know why I did what I did next. I’ve thought about it a lot. I think it was because of my own wedding album, sitting on the shelf in our living room, with a photo of me in a dress with a red wine stain on it. I think it was because I’d heard something in her voice in the kitchen. Something brittle. Something that sounded like a woman who’d put her whole life in a box labeled DUMP and told herself she was fine.
I took the wedding album out of the box.
I didn’t take anything else. Just the album.
I carried it home under my arm, wrapped in my cardigan. I put it on a high shelf in my closet. Behind my winter sweaters.
I told myself that someday, maybe, she’d want it back. People throw things away when they’re hurting. Then they regret it. I’ve seen it happen. My mother threw away every photo of my father after he left, and she spent the last ten years of her life asking me if I had any.
I didn’t tell Vanessa. I didn’t tell Irvin.
I just put it on the shelf. And forgot about it.
For a while.
The first few weeks were fine.
Vanessa came over for coffee a couple of times. She brought a bottle of wine one Friday night, and the three of us sat on our back patio and drank it. She was funny. She told stories about crazy doctors she’d met in her sales job. Irvin laughed his surprised little laugh. Maddie even came out and sat with us for a while, which almost never happens.
