The Name on Our Mailbox

Dad’s brush

My dad painted our name on the mailbox in 1998, the spring Gary and I bought the house place from Gary’s folks. He used to letter signs on the side for people around the county, feed store signs, church signs, the names on the doors of pickups. He had a box of brushes he kept wrapped in a dish towel.

The year his hands started to shake, he gave me the box.

“You’ve got the steadier hand,” he said. “Always did.”

I had used those brushes for church banners and a sign for Tyler’s FFA chapter and not much else. They were in a coffee can on the shelf above the workbench, with the dish towel still around them.

The mailbox at the end of our lane is the big black kind, number two size, on a cedar post Gary set in concrete. On the side, in Dad’s white letters, it said RASMUSSEN. The paint had held up all those years with one touch-up.

I found a quart of white oil enamel on the shelf. It was cold as a stone, and thick. I ran the hot water in the shop sink and set the can in a pail of it for twenty minutes while I wiped down the box with a rag and a little mineral spirits.

It was twenty-four degrees and so bright out that the snow hurt to look at. The kind of January morning where the sky is a hard blue and the grain bins shine like they are made of something better than steel. The snow squeaked under my boots all the way down the lane.

I knew the paint would take all day to set in that cold. I did not care. I knelt down in the snow beside the post and set the can on a feed sack so it would not sink.

I started right after the last N. A comma first. Then a D, and an E, and a B. Dad taught me to pull the stroke toward me and turn the brush, not my wrist, and I could hear him saying it.

I was halfway through the ampersand when I saw Gary come out the back door and start down the lane toward me. He had his work jacket on, unzipped, and his hair was still wet and was going to freeze. He was coming for the mail. He comes for the mail every day at ten.

I kept painting. My hand was steady, which surprised me.

The gravel under the snow crunched closer. He stopped beside the post. I could see his boots, the brown ones with the left lace I had replaced twice.

He read it. I watched him read it. RASMUSSEN, DEB, and half an ampersand, shining wet in the sun.

Then he looked down at me, on my knees in the snow with my father’s brush in my hand.

He pulled off his right glove. His jaw was working the way it did that first week home, when he would start a sentence at the supper table and have to put his fork down to finish it.

“Deb,” he said, and his voice broke on it.