The coming years would bring with them insomnia.  Those nights, she would lay on her side and watch the red minutes flicking by, agonizingly slow, calculating the hours until she had to get up again.  She would hate the snoring coming from the other side of the bed, would blame it for her sleeplessness, but it would always be her mind keeping her awake.

            Two o'clock, and she would sit up, rub at her eyes, and walk out to the kitchen.  She would never need a light.

            She would turn on the lamp that shone over her shoulder, and she would take up a charcoal pencil and paper.  For a few moments she would revel in the terror of that blank page, but it would pass, because at two-oh-three on a Thursday morning in her pajamas in her kitchen in Scranton, she knew what she had to do.

            It always centered around the eyes.  Usually she liked to do the shape of the face first when she was doing portraits, just to get a sense of proportion.  She'd done that at first with this one, too, but that had never worked.  So, eyes: heavy-lidded, mutable, but smiling.  They were hard to capture, and if she didn't get them on the first try she would move onto more comfortable things (landscapes, portraits of anyone else), but if they turned out she'd go on to the nose, a little lumpy and heavy.  From there a head of shaggy hair, big ears, a wide face.

            Last of all was the mouth.  It always came out well.  It was always grinning, just the broadest, most shameless, most exuberant grin.  If the portrait failed, it was the fault of the eyes, done too hastily or without the right clearness and intelligence, because she knew his smile too well to ever draw it wrong.

            Most nights it wouldn't turn out.  She had to have a particular and rare sort of grace to capture him.  But some nights it would turn out, and she would run her hands over it, feeling him out in the furrows and caves left by the imprint of her pencil.  The lines would smudge and run, covering him with a fog, turning that grin into just a gray smear with an impression of lips and teeth and joy.  Then she would slip the paper into her portfolio, next to the others.  She knew they'd never be looked at by anyone but her.  She knew she was safe.  Then she would turn off the light and get back into bed and fail to sleep the two hours before she had to wake up again.

            She would keep them all, failures and successes.  All in all, she would fill five portfolios with him and him alone.  When her husband died, she would try to burn them, but wouldn't be able to, and that night she would sleep soundly and conclude that it was the snoring that had kept her awake after all.