The swimsuit was still drying over the back of the kitchen chair when I printed the screenshot.
Under our old ceiling light, the picture looked brighter than it had on the beach. I stood there staring at it, wondering how something that had made me feel beautiful one evening could make me feel ashamed the next morning.
George had chosen the swimsuit.
“Mary,” he’d said during our weekend by the Gulf, holding it up with a grin, “you’ve been hiding behind navy blue since 1998.”
“I like navy blue.”
“You like disappearing inside it.”
After forty-one years of marriage, a woman earns the right to roll her eyes at her husband.
But I wore the swimsuit.
Not for Facebook.
Not for strangers.
For George.
At seventy-two, his hair had thinned and his knees complained whenever he stood too quickly. But when he slipped his arm around my waist, I still felt like the twenty-one-year-old woman who had once walked toward him in a borrowed wedding veil.
A young woman on the beach offered to take our picture.
George kissed my cheek.
“Don’t you dare hide,” he whispered.
I laughed.
The photograph captured that exact moment.
That night, I posted it with a simple caption:
Still his favorite girl.
