Because if he is, then all the rest will fit somehow. All the rest will be—
He looks down at the frame in his hands.
The picture isn’t folded back.
There is no black woman staring back at him.
He says, “No.”
He says, “No, no, no.”
It’s a trick, he thinks. Just a trick. It’s there, it’s dark, and you can’t see her, it’s there.
He pulls the picture out. There’s Happy. Calvin and Donald. And Sean, always Sean.
But there’s no one standing beside him.
In fact, Sean’s at the edge of the photo.
It’s just the four of them.
“It’s been torn,” he says. “It’s been torn.”
It hasn’t been torn. The edges of the photo are the same on all sides, smooth and bordered white. The border is the same thickness on all sides, so it hasn’t been cut. And there’s a space between the border and the curve of Sean’s arm in the photo, a good inch, which probably translated to about a foot in real life.
She was standing closer than that. He knows it. She was right next to Sean.
But she’s not now.
And maybe, he thinks, she never was.
He lets out a choked breath and thinks, No.
Because he’s not crazy. He’s not.
He drops the photo to the ground.
He looks back to the remaining photos on the walls all around him.
There have to be two hundred of them. Maybe three. All varying sizes.
She has to be here. She has to be.
“Somewhere,” he mutters. “That stacked honey, fo sho.”
He starts with the ones nearest to him. He’s careful. At first.
But every photo he takes apart gives him nothing but what he already sees.
He’s less careful as time passes.
He’s halfway done when he’s just shattering the glass on the tables and ripping the photos out from the frames.
Mike’s hyperventilating, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see a starling perched on a lamppost outside, but he ignores it. He ignores it because she’s not here, she’s not in any of the photos, and neither is he, the man who smoked cigars and called him Mikey. He knows this man, can almost see his face, but he’s not in the photos, Nadine’s not in the photos, and he sees Walter in some, and Sean. Mrs. Richardson. The women in the book club. Calvin and Donald and Happy. Daniel Houle and George Kettner. Doc. Everyone else he knows, everyone else he sees every goddamn day. The people he passes on the street. The ones who say good morning when he comes into the diner. The patrons in his store. His neighbors. His friends. His community. He sees them all on the wall, they’re all—
There comes a point in everyone’s life when the weight of everything gets to be too much. When the world around them begins to falter and crack. Mike Frazier knows this. He knows he’s been lucky, and that for the past three years, he’s been okay.
But this is the moment he breaks.