The museum alarm went off for a painting nobody visits

Dear Delyara, I have guarded the same gallery for thirty-one years, and I know which paintings receive crowds and which ones spend whole afternoons unseen. This morning, before opening, an alarm sounded beside a small portrait of an elderly woman holding a bowl of pears. No one had touched it. A moth had flown too close to the sensor. While I waited for security to reset the system, I stood alone in front of the woman’s face. Her name is not known. The artist wrote only “Mother, winter 1887” on the back of the canvas. Thousands of visitors walk past her each year toward saints, battles, and beautiful young women. I have always walked past too. Today, with the alarm ringing, it felt as though the building itself were insisting that somebody notice her. My own mother died when I was twenty and exists in only two blurred photographs. I stayed after the alarm stopped. I looked at the painted woman’s tired eyes, the cracked skin around her fingers, and the way she held the bowl as if offering fruit to someone outside the frame. Then the doors opened, and the first visitors hurried past us both.