She opened the door to the closet, and I was shocked to see that it was almost as big as the bedroom itself. She yanked the chain, and a light bulb mounted to the bare wood of a rafter cast a yellow glow over rows of garment bags. She started to unzip them and clacked through the hangers, pausing every minute or so to wrestle a piece from the bag and hold it to the light.

“Cute, but not right for you, perhaps. Let’s see … I think there’s another one like it but without the pleats.” She mostly seemed to want to talk to herself, hold her own council. I could picture what she had been like as a shop owner. Authoritative without being bossy. Never afraid to step in with a recommendation, but not too pushy either. I was scanning the rest of the closet, trying to add up how long it would take her to sort through all of the bags, when I saw that there were frames propped against the wall. I could only make out their bottom edges—someone had draped white sheets over the tops. I hesitated, pinched a corner of the sheet between my fingers. She had been so insistent on showing me upstairs that I figured she wouldn’t mind—just a look.

While Mil unzipped more garment bags, I lifted the fabric and took a small, almost involuntary sip of breath. I had expected some horrible 1970s paint-by-numbers, a velvet painting depicting a Playboy-esque nude, a tacky crewel made from fuzzy, fraying yarn.

I’d found instead a painting of a man with a bandage over his eye. He was seated, and it took me a moment to realize that he was in a wheelchair, but then I noticed the arms of his chair at the bottom of the frame, the handles jutting out behind him. His gaze was turned away from the viewer, and his expression gave me the feeling that he hadn’t wanted to be seen, that he felt ashamed, even. I crouched to look at the brushwork: precise and delicate on the face, while the broad strokes of his shirt gave the impression of haste. The discrepancy made his expression all the more intense, the evasion in his eyes all the more legible. Behind me, Mil was saying something about box pleats versus kick pleats. I lifted the rest of the sheet: another portrait, of a woman, in what looked like an old nurse’s uniform. Her hair fell in limp curls around her chin, and even though, unlike the man, she stared straight out of the painting, there was something withholding about her, something crimped about her expression. As though she were pinching herself outside the frame. Mildred turned, holding out a belted navy dress.

“Oh, you found the pictures, I see. My husband collected them.”

“What are they? Who did them?”