The Invitations in the Mop Bucket
I put the card and the envelope side by side on the towel. I laid a second towel over them. And on top of that I set my grandmother’s cast iron skillet, the big one, and I left it there all night.
In the morning the paper had dried stiff and a little wavy. The stain had gone the color of weak tea. The stamp had lifted at one corner and I pressed it back down with my thumb.
Nana Bea’s handwriting on the front was a blur and no use to a mail carrier. I did not write over it. I wrote underneath, small and plain, in ballpoint.
Mrs. Joanne, and her last name, and her rural route address.
I put the stained card back inside and sealed the flap with a strip of tape, because the glue was long gone.
The post office is on the square, between the pharmacy and a store that has sold boots since before my mother was born. There was one person ahead of me. Kim was working the window. She has worked that window as long as I can remember and she knows every box number in town by heart.
I set the envelope on the counter.
She turned it around with one finger. She looked at the tide line, and the blurred ink, and the tape, and my ballpoint underneath.
“Honey,” she said. “This one’s been wet.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You want a fresh envelope? I’ve got some back here. I won’t even charge you.”
“No ma’am. I’d like it to go just like that.”
She looked at the address again. She knew whose address it was. She had been handing Joanne her mail for thirty years.
Kim looked up at me over her glasses, and I watched her decide not to ask.
“That stamp’s still good,” she said. “Never got canceled.”
“Then it’s paid for.”
She set it in the outgoing tray, face up, by itself.
“It’ll be in her box tomorrow,” she said.
“Thank you, Kim.”
I had not told Ian yet.
I told him that night on the back steps of our rent house, because I couldn’t do it sitting across a table from him.
He had been on a pole since six that morning and he smelled like creosote and sunscreen. He sat one step below me with his boots unlaced.
I told it flat. The bucket. The shelf. The box on the dryer.
He was quiet a long time. A whip-poor-will was going somewhere down by the dry creek.
“She said it fell?” he said.
“She said it fell.”
“Well.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Kels, that shelf’s not real steady. I’ve told her that.”
“The box was dry, Ian.”
“Maybe she picked it up after.”
“And dried it? And set the lid next to it?”
He didn’t answer that.
I want to be fair to him here, because I love him and because I understood it. Ian’s daddy died when Ian was 22. A heart attack at a stock show, standing up, with a cup of coffee in his hand. After that it was just Ian and Joanne on that place, and Joanne is a woman who cries beautifully and on schedule. Ian had spent six years, and really his whole life before that, learning that the fastest way through any trouble with his mother was to find the version of it where nobody had done anything.