The Box Only Marge Could Open

“The small ones are fifty-eight dollars a year, here. Plus the key deposit. You get two keys.”

“Is there one open?”

She checked. “One fourteen. Bottom section, third row. It was Walt Jurgens’s until he went to the home.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I need two kinds of identification for a box. One with your picture, one with your street address on it.”

I laid my driver’s license on the counter, and then I laid the car registration beside it.

Bev laughed, the first time that morning. “Of course you did.”

I filled out the application in my own hand. Then I filled out a second change of address, from my house to box 114, permanent, and I signed it with the loop in the M while Bev watched me do it. She said afterward she had never enjoyed witnessing a signature so much in her life.

I wrote a check for the fifty-eight dollars and the deposit. I entered it in my check register before I tore it out, the way I always have.

Bev came around through the lobby door with two small brass keys on a paper tag.

“There’s a few things back here that hadn’t gone out to Cedar yet,” she said. “I pulled them when I saw the name. I’ll put them in so you’ve got something to open.”

I walked down the wall. The morning sun was coming through the front window, laying a long gold square across the linoleum and halfway up the boxes. One fourteen was at the height of my elbow. The key was stiff. It turned on the second try.

Three envelopes. The electric cooperative. The church newsletter. And a square pink one addressed in pencil, in big careful letters, to Grandma Marge.

“Marge,” Bev said from the lobby door. “For what it’s worth. He always asks after you when he comes in for stamps. He’s not a hard man.”

“I know he’s not,” I said. “That’s what makes it difficult.”

I opened the pink envelope in the car. It was from Emma, who is nine. Her class had been learning to write a friendly letter, with the heading and the greeting and the closing in the right places. She told me her tooth had come out at recess and that Tyler made the junior high team. She had drawn our old dog Biscuit with wings on, which is how she draws him now. At the bottom she had written, “Please write back, I like getting mail.”

I sat in the post office lot and cried a little over that, with the heater running. Then I blew my nose and drove home, because I had work to do.

I called Lisa at the county treasurer’s office on her lunch hour.

“Mom? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. I’d like you and Greg to come for coffee Saturday morning. Just the two of you. Nine o’clock.”

A pause. “Is this about the mail?”

“What do you know about the mail, honey?”

“Greg said you and he had worked out a system. That he’d pick it up and go through it with you once a week.” Her voice went careful. “Didn’t you?”

So there it was. He had not told her either. Not all of it.

“Saturday,” I said. “I’ll make the cinnamon rolls.”

“Mom, you’re scaring me.”

“Nobody’s in trouble, Lisa. Nine o’clock.”

I had two days. I spent them the way I would have spent two days before the auditors came.