I returned home one day to a stack of large framed pictures on the dining room table, all new to me. I picked through the pile.
Mr. Neighbor in a graduation cap and gown.
Mr. Neighbor and his wife.
Mr. Neighbor in a cowboy hat, a heavy gold chain circling his neck, his clip-on sunglasses flipped up over regular lenses so we could see his eyes smiling too.
Someone had printed the pictures on regular paper. Horizontal lines streaked through the one of Mr. N and his wife, evidence of a printer’s ink running low.
“What’s all this?” I called out to anyone within earshot.
Husband entered the room. “Mr. N brought them out to me in the truck when I got home today.”
Who gives away framed 8 x 10s of themselves? Dread stirred something in my gut. “Why?”
Husband shrugged. “Just wanted us to have them, I guess.”
“People don’t usually give away framed pictures,” I said, “unless they’re dying.”
“I doubt he is.”
I pictured Mr. N wiped from his house, this neighborhood, this life. Tears bubbled at the corners of my eyes. Ours had been a strange relationship. What started out as Mr. N’s animosity towards us in 2004 had shifted in 2010 because of a simple card—our Christmas card—I had delivered to him with some cookies. Warming to us after that, the man had tuned in to our comings and goings, memorizing all of our names and the girls’ ages, and volunteered to help when he saw a project in progress, like the construction of our bocce ball court out front. He even asked my permission to call me Tam.
“I’m just going to ask him.” I strode to the front door and stepped into flip-flops. “And I don’t really care what he thinks.”
I made a beeline across the street to Mr. N’s place and rapped on the door. Voices inside. Almost a minute passed. I knocked again. The thud of footsteps. A click of the deadbolt. The door opened.
Mr. N stood in the doorway, looking distracted like he usually did, a brown cigarette pinched between his lips. As usual too was the dark interior of his house. Did he ever open the curtains or turn on a light? He nodded hello, removing his smoke and exhaling a plume above our heads.
“I can put this out,” he said, looking past me.
I waved away his offer. “I just came over to thank you for the nice pictures.”
“Well, you gave me your Christmas card in 2010. And every year after that. Remember?”
Of course I did. He wouldn’t let me forget. “Well, yeah.”
“I’ve kept them all. Wanna see?” He glanced at me, then looked into the distance again. “Because I’ll show you right now.” He thumbed the air behind him like I didn’t believe him and he needed to prove it.
“No, I’m good.” I smiled. “I’m just wondering about those pictures you gave us. It’s a big gesture.” How could I politely ask if he was dying? I frowned. “Are you not long for this world, Mr. N?”
He dragged his gaze from everything else around me and zeroed in on my face like my question annoyed him. “Nothing like that. My colonoscopy was clear and the doc said my lungs are good. He can’t believe I’ve smoked for forty-seven years.”
A movement behind him. His thirty-three-year-old son, Ricky, stepped into his shadow and stayed there, maybe hoping to hide so he could overhear the conversation. He was stouter than Mr. N, though, and his borders poked out beyond the older man’s.
I leaned around Mr. N. “Is that you back there, Ricky?”
“Yeah.” The young man mumbled the word, still keeping back.
“I’ve been meaning to write you all a letter,” Mr. N said, taking a drag.
“Oh?”
“Because I have things to say to you.”
“Okay.” Curiosity pricked me—suspicion too—but the Mr. N of 2019 was not the Mr. N of 2004, a man given to muddled accusations he’d hurl at us from his property across the street. His incoherent rants at us all those years ago only lasted a few weeks before the police cars and EMT crew came, strapped Mr. N to a gurney, and whisked him away.
“Or we can all sit out there sometime,” he said, nodding toward the picnic table in his front yard, “and I can tell you what I want to say.”
“Our place works too,” I said. “We’ve been meaning to have you over for pizza anyway.”
“I like pizza,” Ricky mumbled from the shadows.
“Oh, good,” I said, like I had suggested pickled herring and finally found a fan.
“So, you’re okay with a letter?” Mr. N said.
What was his grand pronouncement for us that needed either a visit or a letter? The suspense needled me. “Of course.”
“It’s about my feelings for your family.”
Good ones, I hoped. Ill-will didn’t normally allow someone to part with framed 8 x 10s, did it? “Well, whatever it is, we love you, Mr. N.” I leaned around the man again to catch a glimpse of his son. “And we love you, Ricky.”
A monotone response piped from the shadows. “Love you too.”
“Okay, looking forward to your letter,” I said, patting Mr. N’s arm, and turned to go.
Ricky stepped out of hiding. “Maybe I can find a picture for you too.”
Two days later, someone thumped on our front door, rattling the house. I plucked the curtains back for a look. Ricky.
I opened the door, smiling at our visitor. “How are you?”
“Good,” he said, pushing a picture frame and letter at me. “Here.”
The letter was from Mr. N, written in blue ink on lined notebook paper, and the frame held a photo of Ricky, a woman, and a toddler of about eighteen months—possibly the cutest kid ever.
“This is really nice.” I touched the picture. “Tell me about them.”
“That’s my baby mama and my daughter.” He said their names and tapped on the frame’s glass, pointing to his girl. “She’s twelve now.”
“Twelve already?” While Ricky lived with Mr. N, I hadn’t seen any kids coming or going from his house. Questions stacked in my mind, but I let them stay there.
“I might be getting visitation soon.” His eyes gleamed with hopes and wishes. What story wrapped around his life as he lived in the shadows of his father’s house?
“This picture makes my day,” I said. “Are you sure I can keep it?”
He nodded like he was trying to shake a hat from his head and it wasn’t coming off.
I clutched the picture to my chest. “I’ll take good care of it.”
Back inside, I read the letter from Mr. N. The full page of writing was error-free, his printing impeccably neat. Had he written and rewritten it until each letter stood resolute?
He delivered the backstory of how he wished he could’ve bought Christmas, birthday, and graduation gifts for our girls while they grew up, but he and his wife decided it might not look good, and he didn’t want to seem like “a weird old man or worse.”
As Mr. N built his story about the gifts, my reading picked up speed, waiting for the big revelation he had alluded to in person. But the note ended like someone hitting stop to a movie right when it was getting good.
Did he say everything he meant to say? I looked at the ending. “I love you all,” it said.
Were those the words he tried to tell me in person without being able to say it? The ones he wanted to express while we sat at his picnic table or while we ate pizza together? Or was he only trying to tell us about gifts this whole time?
I reread the letter. No, the big sentiment rested in those final words.
“I love you all.”
And those words were everything.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.