The Box Only Marge Could Open

“There’s one in here,” she said. “Filed a week ago Monday. Individual, not family. Temporary, six months. Your house to Greg and Lisa’s on Cedar.”

“Six months,” I said.

“Hang on.”

She went into the back. I heard a file drawer. I counted the brass boxes while I waited, because counting settles me.

Bev came back with a form. She set it on the counter and turned it around so it faced me, and she put one finger at the bottom, next to the signature line.

“That’s your name,” she said.

It was. Marjorie A. Olsen, with the date.

“That’s not your hand.”

It was not. I have a bookkeeper’s signature. The M has a loop I learned from Sister Agnes in the fourth grade and never dropped, and my sevens have a bar through them, and I have signed my name in front of Bev on money orders and certified slips for the better part of thirty years. The signature on that form was square and careful and leaned to the left. I had seen that handwriting on every birthday card my grandchildren ever got. “Love, Dad” in that same square hand.

“Who took this in?” I asked.

“The Tuesday girl. She’s new, she drives over from Denison. He handed it across the counter and told her you’d sent him in with it since you were out of town.” Bev’s mouth was a line. “She should have asked for your identification. She knows it now, I promise you. And the system mails a notice out to the old address, to tell you somebody’s put a change in. Did you get one?”

I thought about a man bringing in my mail for three days.

“I expect it arrived,” I said. “I don’t expect it stayed.”

Bev took her glasses off and let them hang.

“Marge, I have to tell you what this is. Signing another person’s name to one of these is not a favor. Opening her mail is not a favor either. There is a number I can call this morning, and a man will drive out from Omaha and ask Greg some questions he will not enjoy.”

“I know what it is.”

“Do you want me to call?”

I looked at the form. I thought about Lisa at seven years old, standing on that same radiator cover so she could see into box 62 when my mother still had it. I thought about Emma and Tyler. I thought about Don, who never raised his voice at that boy once, not even the time Greg backed the grain truck into the shed door.

“No,” I said. “He’s my daughter’s husband. I’ll handle it at my own table.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure. But I want it stopped today, and I want it written down that I was here and said so.”

“That I can do.”

She had me show my license, and she looked at it properly, though she has known me since she was in high school and I was the one who signed her father’s patronage checks. She canceled the forwarding while I watched. She wrote the date and the time on the bottom of Greg’s form in red pen, and the words “customer states not authorized, canceled in person,” and she initialed it and had me initial it too.

“What’s already in the stream may still go to Cedar Street for a day or two,” she said. “After that it comes back to you.”

“To the box at the end of my lane.”

“Yes.”

“The one that doesn’t lock.”

Bev waited.

“What does one of those cost?” I nodded at the brass wall.