The Box Only Marge Could Open

I stood at the storm door and watched his pickup back down my drive and turn toward town. Then I went and looked in my mailbox at the end of the lane, though I knew what I would find. The grocery flyer. A seed catalog addressed to Postal Customer. That was all that had come in eight days, and I had told myself the mail was just slow.

I want to be honest about why I did not have it out with him right there.

Lisa is my only child. Her father, my Don, has been gone since the fall of 2017, a heart attack in the machine shed with the radio still on. If I had lit into Greg at my table, he would have gone home with it, and my daughter would have had to live inside that fight at her own supper table, between her mother and her husband, with two children listening. A scolding lasts one afternoon. I did not want an afternoon. I wanted my mail.

I did not sleep much.

Around two in the morning I got up and sat at the table with the statement. It was not the money. The money was already in the book. It was the picture of it: Greg standing at his own counter, at his house, with my name on an envelope and his thumb under the flap. Reading what I owed. Deciding what I should have done with my own tooth.

What else had come? My bank statement was due. My Medicare supplement notice. A card from Jean, probably. The church newsletter. Maybe nothing a soul would be ashamed of. That was not the point. A person’s mail is the last private room she has.

At six I made coffee. At eight I put on my quilted jacket, got my driver’s license out of my pocketbook to be sure it was there, and took the car registration out of the glove box for good measure. I have filled out enough government forms to know that one piece of proof is never the number they want.

The post office in our town is a tan brick building across from the grain elevator where I worked. It has the flag out front, a boot scraper nobody uses, and a lobby wall of little brass boxes with glass windows that have been there since before I was born. My folks had box 62 when I was a girl. I used to stand on the radiator cover to see in.

Bev was raising the window grate when I came in. She has been our postmaster for nineteen years, and she was a clerk under old Mr. Hansen before that. She wears her reading glasses on a beaded chain her granddaughter made, and she knows every dog on three rural routes by name.

“Marge Olsen,” she said. “You’re out early.”

“I need to ask you about a change of address, Bev.”

“You moving?”

“No,” I said. “That’s what I need to ask you about.”

She looked at me over the glasses. Then she looked past me at the empty lobby, and she lowered her voice anyway.

“Come down to the end of the counter.”

I told her. I kept it short. My son-in-law says he had my mail forwarded to his house. I did not ask for that. I want it stopped.

Bev did not say anything for a moment. She pulled her keyboard over and typed, and I watched her face do what a bookkeeper’s face does when a number comes up that should not be there.