For four years, my girlfriend Ava’s family has had their portrait taken every August at the lake house. And for four years, her mother, Diane, has positioned everybody carefully. Grandparents in the middle. Ava’s sisters and their husbands next. Kids in front. Me, at the very end, on the far right, half a step away from everyone else.
“You’re tall,” Diane always said. “It balances the shot.”
This year, the night before the shoot, I got an email from the photographer that wasn’t meant for me. She’d accidentally replied to the whole thread, which, for the first time, I’d been copied on. It was addressed to Diane.
“Hi Diane! All set for tomorrow. Just confirming that you’d like the same as previous years: one full group shot as posed, and the edited version for the prints and the Christmas card cropped at the far right. Let me know!”
Cropped at the far right.
I sat on the lake house dock reading it for a long time. Four years of Christmas cards on Diane’s mantel. Four years of framed prints in the hallway. I’d never noticed I wasn’t in any of them. I’d just assumed I was somewhere I hadn’t looked.
I showed Ava. I expected her to be shocked. Instead, she put her hand over mine and said, “I know. I’ve known since the first year.”
I pulled my hand back. She held up her phone before I could say anything.
She had a folder. Every year, the day after the photos, she’d emailed the photographer privately and paid for the uncropped files with her own money. In her phone, in her apartment, on her nightstand, in a frame on her desk at work, were the full photos. Every single one. With me in them, on the far right.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel what you’re feeling right now,” she said. “And because I wanted to see if she’d stop on her own. She hasn’t.”
The next morning, at the shoot, Diane started arranging everyone the way she always did. When she got to me and pointed at the far right, Ava stepped out of her spot in the middle and walked over and stood next to me.
“We’ll stand here,” she said. “Together. Crop us both, Mom.”
Nobody moved. Then Ava’s grandfather, who’s eighty-four and doesn’t say much, got up from his chair in the middle, picked it up and carried it over to us. “I’d like to be next to the tall one,” he said.
Ava’s younger sister followed. Then her husband. Then the kids. In about thirty seconds, the whole family had shifted to the right side of the dock. Diane was standing alone on the left.
The photographer, to her eternal credit, said, “Oh, I love this,” and took the picture.
Diane walked over and stood at the edge, next to her father. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t crop it, either.
It’s the Christmas card this year. Ava and I are dead center. I proposed to her on that dock three weeks later.
