He took out a magnifying glass and a Xerox copy of an old newspaper photograph. There she was, Miss Lila Hardwick, slim and graceful and proud—the Rose Queen of 1933. She had a little held-back smile on her lips, as if she knew more than she was willing to show, and in the angle of her head and the look in her eye there was wit and daring.

“Aw,” said Della. “It’s all gone.”

“Look at the roses she’s holding,” said Bob Rigsby, playing the magnifying glass up and down over the dim photograph. Della adjusted her gaze away, then closer until she could see—the roses were streaked with wavery dim and dark stripes.

“I would love it so much,” said Bob Rigsby, “if that rose she’s holding in 1933 is this very rose I’m painting, Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor,’ Fair Rosamund’s rose, Rosa Mundi. I would love that so much.”

The next day was the last of Bob Rigsby’s painting lessons, but instead of holding it as usual at ten in the morning in the recreation room at the nursing home, he invited everyone to his apartment over the old bank building in the late afternoon. “The painting is finished,” he told Della. “It will be a kind of unveiling.”

It made a lot of work for Della. She had to get enough folding chairs up there and arrange for the van with the wheelchair lift and crank up the old freight elevator at the back of the building to avoid the narrow, rickety stairs in the front.

“I think this is in violation of about eight codes,” she said.

“But I need the light,” said Bob Rigsby.

It was worrying at first. Della stood up reassuringly in the front of the van and explained over and over. “We are going for a ride to see Bob Rigsby’s finished painting unveiled. It’s a kind of party or celebration.”

But Emily Hancock heard the word veil and got the idea that they were going to a wedding, and Lucille Patterson misunderstood Emily and thought they were going to a funeral, and Miss Ethel Livingstone kept busy trying to straighten everyone out.

“Not ‘died,’ but ‘bride,’” she said.

“Who died?” asked Miss Emily.

But when they finally got up there and stepped out of the old, creaky freight elevator and onto the second floor, there was Bob Rigsby with his soothing charm, helping them one after another to their chairs like an usher in church. There was the shuffle of settling in, a rattle of walkers, then a general sighing sound as everyone sank down and looked around.