The Boy Carl Wrote to for Twenty Years

The key

I did not sleep that night, and in the morning I found something I had missed. Folded small and taped inside the lid of the box was a yellow slip from the Berne post office. A renewal notice for a rented box. Number 114. Paid through the thirtieth of September.

Beth came on Saturday and found me at the kitchen table with the rubber bands in a pile. She was quiet a long time after I explained.

“Are you angry, Mom?”

“A little,” I said. “I think I’m allowed a little. But mostly I’m trying to work out who’s been waiting for the mail.”

Because I had remembered the key.

It was a small brass key that had sat in the dish by the back door for as long as I could remember, next to the spare truck key and a bottle opener. I had always assumed it went to a padlock on something that had rusted away.

I looked at the date on the slip. The rent had run out two and a half weeks ago. And in all the months before that, nobody in this house had gone to town and looked in that box.

“Mom,” Beth said. “He doesn’t know.”

On Monday morning I put on my good coat. It was a gray, still day, the kind that comes after the first hard frost. I did not take the Buick. I walked the three blocks to Main Street with the key shut up in my fist, past the clock tower and the hardware store.

Denise Lehman was at the counter. She has worked at the Berne post office since Beth was in grade school and has never repeated a word of what she knows.

She saw the key before she saw my face. I watched her see it.

“Marilyn,” she said, very quietly. “I wondered when you’d come.”

She went to the back, and I stood at the counter with my coat buttoned wrong.

She came out with a rubber-banded stack of envelopes. Airmail, thin blue paper with red and blue edging, a Guatemalan stamp on each one with a bird I think was a quetzal. All addressed in the same careful upright hand. Mr. Carl Stoltz, Box 114, Berne, Indiana.

“Rent lapsed the thirtieth,” she said. “We’re supposed to send mail back after thirty days. I’ve been working up to it.” She laid the stack in my hands. “Two and a half weeks I’ve been working up to it. I kept putting them under the register. I could not send those back to him.”

“No,” I said. It was hard to get out. “Thank you.”

“He came in the first of every month,” Denise said. “Most months the box was empty and he’d say, ‘Well, Denise, nothing from the other side of the world.’ And the months there was one, he’d hold it up.”

I counted the envelopes right there. Four.