Standing in line at our local Safeway checkout, I observed the most beautiful woman. She must have been sixty, yet age had not withered her. Glancing away so as not to seem obvious, I turned my head back towards her—and became paralysed with shock. It was Laura, my wife for the past thirty-two years.
Despite her present loveliness, her eyes were preoccupied with worried concern. Each day of our lives together, whenever her guard was down, I witnessed that same look of worry and concern.
Once, Laura shared the first photo of herself. She must have been three. The photo in her hand was now in hues of brown. Laura was standing, clutching a dresser for support. But it was her eyes that pierced your heart. She bore a visage of apprehension, gazing far into the distance, as though the photographer had caught her unawares. The same expression I saw in her today, standing in the adjacent checkout queue at Safeway.
Our lives together were laced with one financial disaster after another: collapsed businesses; our new home foreclosed on; the lack of daily sustenance for our boys, one a year old and his brother twenty-one months older. On occasions when her mask dropped, she displayed the same expression as in her photo as a child. Despite her continuous worry, not once did she raise any recrimination against the disastrous financial decisions I had taken, with all their torturous effects on our family. She stood beside me—the rock her husband and sons all clung to.
In my seventieth year to heaven, with youth’s lust long gone, a phoenix is reborn of love: forever reliable, steadfast to the end.
