The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

I should have laughed that off. Instead I took the coffee, and it was exactly right, and I stood on that dock in the cool of the morning next to a man I did not know, and the lake was flat as a dinner plate, and a loon or something like it called out across the water, and for the first time in six years I felt the empty place in my chest get a little smaller.

His name was Walter Behrens. He was sixty eight. He had carried the rural mail out of a little town in Iowa called Pell for thirty four years, the same route, the same gravel roads, the same mailboxes, until he knew every dog and every pothole and every family’s joys and troubles by what came in their box. His wife had been named Marion. She had passed two years before, after a long illness, the kind that takes a person an inch at a time so that by the end you have already grieved them twice.

He told me all that in the first hour, standing on the dock, not because he was trying to work me the way Darlene said. He told me because I asked, and because he was a man who answered what he was asked, plainly, with no decoration, the way a mail carrier tells you the road is washed out at the creek. There was something restful about it. Raymond had been a man of few words, and I had grown up thinking that was just men, but Walt Behrens was not a man of few words. He was a man of exactly the right words.

We spent that day together without ever deciding to. We walked the shore path. We found a bench and watched a father teach a boy to cast, and the boy hooked his own cap and Walt laughed so hard he had to sit down. We ate lunch at the same table and Darlene watched us over her chicken salad with her mouth pursed up like a drawstring bag.

By the fourth day I was happier than I had any business being. I will not pretend otherwise. I was sixty seven and I was carrying coffee down to a dock to stand next to a man and I felt like a girl, and there is no fool like an old fool, and I knew it, and I did not care.

And then I noticed the thing.

It was a small thing at first. Every evening, after supper, Walt would fold his napkin, set it beside his plate, say “I’ll see you at the fire,” and get up and leave. And he would be gone a little over an hour. And he would come back quiet, settled, like a man who has set something down, and he would find me at the bonfire ring and pick up right where we left off as if no time had passed.