Stranger in the Photo
written by: Marie Anderson
The photo falls into my lap as I riffle my wife’s knitting book. She’s buried three days, my wife. The guy in the photo is pricked all over with holes. All are pin-sized, all but one. I finger the one larger hole, pea-sized it is, imagining my wife’s fingers on that hole, which is right below the guy’s belt, between his thickish legs.
Who’s this guy in the photo? His lips are flatlined, straight as a knife. What, he’s too macho to smile for the camera? He’s a brute, a brown-suited rectangle topped by a thug face and slicked-up brown hair, a popular style back in the day. I used to slick my own hair up. Now there’s not enough to comb over. One of his eyebrows is higher than the other. His eyes laser me like I’m Churchill to his Hitler. His forehead is unusually high, a sign of intelligence, which is what my old man always said about my high forehead, his too. I am intelligent, kicked out of the University of Notre Dame not because of bad grades but because of ridiculous rules. Too smart for my own good, my sainted mother often said. Like her, I’ve never suffered fools gladly. But how smart can I be if I didn’t know about this guy?
This creep is a stranger to me. But not, obviously, to my dead wife. And not a stranger to my house. My house!
In the photo, behind the thug, is the chair I’m sitting in now, my wife’s ugly orangey-flowered chair. And behind the thug is a Christmas tree topped by the angel we’ve had on our tree for 31 Christmases. Over the chair in the photo, and over my head right now, a plate hangs like a dead sun on our gray wall. It’s a commemorative plate showing the church where we married, where her priest brother baptized our twin daughters, where our girls sang in the grade school choir, where we suffered through their funeral Mass.
They never made it to double digits. Nine years old. Car accident.
I’d only had a six-pack. I wasn’t “impaired.” The first uniforms on the scene were from my precinct. They knew I didn’t need to blow in the tube or get my blood pulled at the hospital.
Last week, my wife died. Also a car, but maybe not an accident. A car deliberate. She drove right into a massive oak tree.
Her priest brother’s eulogy never mentioned me, my loss. I couldn’t believe it. He droned on and on about all the people in her life and never mentioned me! The husband! Well, I’m done with Father Dunn. No more of my cash going into his Sunday collection basket. No more of my butt warming his Sunday pew.
Who is this guy in the photo? In my house! At Christmas time! He obviously meant something to my wife if she stuck—hid!—his mug shot in her knitting book. He looks in his thirties, and it’s a Polaroid, so it was probably taken long ago. Long ago she coulda gotten away with whoring around, especially once our girls were gone and I was gone a lot too, keeping the citizens safe.
The holes are creepy. Funny, too. He dumped her, most likely, and she voodoo-pricked the prick, probably using a knitting needle to punch out the guy’s Johnson. I laugh, shake my head. That’s her MO all right, passive aggressive.
Knitting for Dummies. That’s the book where I found the photo. Only reason I’ve found it is that I’m taking all her shit to Goodwill tomorrow. But I know to check her hiding places.
Once, in her tampon box, I found Greyhound bus tickets for three to Seattle where her liberal sister lives, far from our Chicago bungalow. Three tickets. One way. At the time, we were a family of four. The tickets were for a ride in seven days.
I threw the tickets out.
She never said a thing.
Another time, in her Bible, I found six one-hundred-dollar bills. I took them, and almost doubled them in a Hold-Em game at Harrah’s Casino in Joliet but went all in with pocket aces and lost to a flush on the river. A bad bet.
I never beat her. Never beat our girls. A slap and a strap, yes. But never a beat down. I’m no brute. This brute in the photo, though, he’s ready to throw a punch at whoever he’s glaring at. His dangling hands are almost fists.
I gaze at him, my gut jumping. He’s a scary-looking brute.
The doorbell rings. Shit. Not another neighborly casserole, please.
I move through the kitchen to the front door and look through the peephole.
Well, well, well. It’s Father Dunn. My wife’s big brother. I let him in. He carries a platter covered by a kitchen towel patterned with smiling apples.
“Smells good, Padre,” I say. “Kinda like rotten bananas and bad whiskey.”
He smiles. “It’s the oil I used, Luther.”
He follows me to the kitchen, sees the stranger’s photo where I threw it on the table.
“Ah,” he says. “Looks like someone was mad at you.”
I snort. “Me? What are you talking about?”
He points at the photo. Looks from it to me.
“How young you were, Luther.”
“What?” My heart spasms. “That’s not me, you moron!”
Dunn chuckles. “Whoa! I think you really believe it! I’ve preached on that, you know. How blind we can be to our own sinful nature. How if we could see ourselves as others do, we’d think we were looking at a stranger. But you, Luther, have taken self-blindness to a Twilight Zone level. Or perhaps there’s a Dorian Gray thing going on with you?”
“Dorian Gray?”
“Dorian the sinner stayed young and beautiful. All his evil went to his portrait.”
I glance at the photo, shake my head. “Save your metaphysical preaching for your sheep, Padre. You’re hallucinating. Or you’ve been drinking too much of your consecrated wine. I don’t know this creep. It’s not me. And speaking of me, odd how you didn’t mention me, the grieving husband, in my wife’s eulogy.”
Dunn sighs. “I think you mean metaphorical preaching, Luther. And I did mention you in your wife’s eulogy. Metaphorically anyway, when I talked about the devil.” He sets down the towel-covered platter on the table, right on top of the photo. “I’m at fault too. I suspected my sister’s troubles. But I did nothing.”
I reach for the towel, the ugly towel with its smiling apple pattern. Whatever my brother-in-law has brought, I’ll throw it at his self-righteous, smug, smiling face.
He never mentioned me, the husband, in his goddamn eulogy!
I grab the towel, fling it away.
What the . . .
My bladder lets loose. Piss burns my thighs. It’s not food I’m seeing on the platter.
Dunn gets to it before I do. He points it at my head. “Just oiled it,” he said. “It’s good to go.”
“That’s not me!” I scream.
“I have two bullets,” he says. “Let us pray.”
- Stranger in the Photo - September 6, 2024
