There it sat. Quiet. Still. Nothing but bees drifting among the flowers atop the casket. The service was just as her father deserved. Friends. Family. Neighbors. Old coworkers. He kept his confidants close but built his community wide. Everyone belonged. Faces from every season of his life filled the chapel, each wanting to say goodbye.
The cemetery service was more intimate; reserved for his closest family and friends as a final chance to bid farewell. Among the mourners, one stood out. A stranger. With a weathered sketchbook balanced upon his knee, he danced his pencil across the page. Valeriya watched him. He never met her gaze. She searched her memory but found no recollection of him.
Who was this man? He did not participate. Simply drew. Her father would have welcomed him in, family or not. But was it fair to other guests? Valeriya would approach him following the burial.
He belonged at the chapel service, but not here. Not right now.
Leaves whispered through the branches of a nearby oak. Clouds dotted the sky, carrying the scent of approaching rain.
A tightness gripped her chest, tears threatening to fall. There’d be time to cry later. Valeriya swiped at her face, closed her eyes, and let the wind embrace her.
Opening her eyes, the preacher’s final words drifted past as the casket made its final descent. Following the service, a few attendees approached to offer condolences before leaving. Staring at the casket, she didn’t hear her uncle approach, startling at his touch.
“Oh…hi, Uncle Jun.” A sniffle escaped her. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing how I’m doing. How are you holding up, kiddo?” He gave her a gentle shoulder hug.
“I’m holding how I’m holding.”
Something shifted beneath his arm.
“What’s that?” She gestured to the item.
He looked down. “This?” He pulled out the worn sketchbook. “Some fellow left it behind?”
“When did he leave? Who was he?”
Uncle Jun shrugged. “Funeral director figured he was with us. I thought maybe he was one of your dad’s old friends.”
“So did I.”
“You don’t know him?”
She shook her head, swallowing the lump in her throat.
“Huh.” He gazed at the sketchbook. “Well… someone ought to hang onto it. He might come looking for it.”
She accepted it. The cover was soft with age, the leather worn smooth around the edges. It had spent years in someone’s hands. The sketchbook wasn’t hers.
Uncle Jun squeezed her shoulder and left.
Valeriya stood alone for another moment before carrying the sketchbook to her car. She placed it on the passenger seat and closed the door. For several minutes she simply sat behind the steering wheel. Rain tapped against the windshield, mirroring the tears now staining her face.
She glanced to the right. Opening it felt wrong. But if there was a name…a phone number…anything that might help her return it… She slipped her thumb beneath the cover and paused, took a breath, and opened the book.
The sketches were simple, drawn with soft, curved pencil lines. One object in each had been rendered in extraordinary detail. What caught her attention were the faces…or lack thereof. They were blank. She furrowed her brows. There were no names. No dates. Without faces, anyone could have been in the drawings.
The first drawing depicted a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor with a little girl tucked against her side. Mrs. Donnelly, the children’s librarian. She always wore a flower in her hair…this one a simple lily. In her lap rested an open book in remarkable detail, each page carefully shaded.
Valeriya turned to the next page. A crossing guard knelt beside a little boy, working patiently with the zipper on his backpack while traffic waited. The zipper was drawn perfectly.
Another page. A mechanic sat beside a teenage girl with a flat tire, placing a lug wrench into her hands instead of using it himself.
Another. A teenage boy slipped his phone into his pocket, body bending toward his little sister who was holding up a crayon drawing with both hands. The drawing itself seemed almost real.
An elderly man, hunched over the counter, counted coins one at a time while a cashier waited without impatience. Another customer quietly pointed to the next coin. The handful of change had been rendered so carefully she almost expected it to rattle against the paper.
A mail carrier knelt to hand a little dog its daily biscuit before continuing down the sidewalk. The biscuit was detailed.
A police officer knelt on a chalk four square court stretched across the sidewalk. Middle schoolers surrounded him. His head tipped back, one hand pressed against his stomach while the other steadied him against the pavement. The chalk lines were the clearest part of the drawing. She recognized the officer by the braided bracelet around his wrist. She remembered his daughter proudly giving it to him.
A woman reached toward the top shelf in a grocery store. Someone beside her quietly placed the cereal box into her cart. The cereal box was almost lifelike. Valeriya smiled. No one else in the aisle even seemed to notice.
She paused at the next page. Two women sat on opposite ends of the park bench. Neither animated. Just a paper coffee cup sitting between them. Valeriya frowned. She didn’t understand this one. Nothing seemed to happen. Yet somehow…
Somehow, the artist had found meaning where she found none.
She turned another page. Another park bench. Her breath hitched. It wasn’t the two men she recognized. It was the thermos resting on the ground between them. Even without color, she knew it instantly. She’d grown up with that thermos. The dent sat in the exact same place as the green one her father carried everywhere.
Her father sat at one end of the bench, his forearms resting on his knees. Beside him, another man leaned back, one ankle crossed over the other. Neither looked at the other. Neither reached for the thermos. They simply shared the silence.
Her lips trembled as she rested her fingertips lightly against the page. She had never seen her father sit this still. Valeriya took a shaky breath to quiet the thrumming of her heart.
Why this moment?
Out of an entire lifetime…why this one?
She turned another page. Then another. Unable to stop herself, she caught the remaining pages beneath her thumb and let them flutter. Sketches blurred together. Parents. Children. Workers. Neighbors. Young. Old. Moments she recognized. Moments she didn’t. Lives she’d never know.
She slowly closed the sketchbook. These weren’t portraits. They were moments. Moments no one else had seemed to notice.
For the next several days, the sketchbook rarely left her passenger seat. She carried it into the house each night, only to place it back in the car each morning. Every time she opened it, she stopped at the same pages. Mrs. Donnelly. The crossing guard. The mechanic. The mail carrier. The cashier. Her father.
She wrestled with herself. The drawings weren’t hers. Neither were the people in them. Maybe the artist would come back. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe they had never been meant to leave the sketchbook at all.
Still…
She couldn’t shake the feeling that the moments belonged to the people who had unknowingly posed for them. Her fingers found the corner of the first page. She hesitated. This wasn’t hers. Neither was the life it captured.
The paper resisted as she carefully tore it free. She almost tucked it back into the binding. Instead, she folded it once and slipped it into her coat pocket.
One by one, she returned only the moments of people she recognized. Mrs. Donnelly found hers tucked inside a returned library book. The crossing guard discovered his beneath a windshield wiper before school. The mechanic found his waiting on his workbench. Others appeared quietly where only their subjects would find them.
She never stayed to watch.
She never signed her name.
The moments belonged to them.
Her father’s sketch remained inside the weathered book. So did every drawing of strangers she couldn’t identify. She hoped one day she’d meet the artist again. She wanted to return what was left. After leaving the final sketch she recognized, she walked back across the parking lot toward her car. Something white rested beneath her windshield wiper. She stopped. It wasn’t there a moment ago. Her hands trembled as she unfolded the page. No faces. Only a woman quietly sliding a folded sketch beneath the windshield wiper of another car. The sketch in her hand had been drawn in extraordinary detail.
She looked up. Cars backed from their spaces. Doors closed. Conversations drifted across the lot. The stranger was nowhere to be seen.
She slipped the drawing inside the weathered sketchbook and rested her hand on the cover, holding it there for a long moment.
A father knelt beside his little girl, patiently tying her untied shoe.
For the first time since the funeral…
Valeriya smiled.