The Flags on My Mail Route Went Up

What I could not say to Joanne

I was eligible to retire at fifty-seven. I said “next year” for seven years.

Joanne let me. She never pushed. She did the books and the garden and the church flowers and waited, and every fall I said the same thing, and every fall she said, “Well, whenever you’re ready.”

I was afraid of who would knock.

You cannot say that to your wife of forty years without sounding like you think the world will fall apart without you. But I believed it, a little. I believed that on some Wednesday after I left, somebody on my road would have a third day of mail in the box and the carrier would be a stranger who drove by.

In August of this year, I finally told Joanne the number. “I’ll go the end of October,” I said. “I want to do the leaves one more time.”

She did not argue. She put her hand on my arm and said, “All right, Virgil.”

In September they sent Tasha Reinhart to ride with me for two weeks. Tasha is twenty-six, from Sullivan, with a two-year-old and a way of asking questions that makes you hear your own answers. She had been a substitute for about a year and a half, and she was the one who got Route 3.

I showed her the roads and the dogs and which boxes stick in the cold. I did not show her the notebook. I told her the rule instead.

“Three days of mail in the box, you stop and you knock. Don’t make a thing of it. Carry a reason.”

She wrote it on the back of her hand with a ballpoint pen, in block letters: three days. Then she looked at me and said, “How do you decide who to knock for?”

“After the first year you’ll just know,” I said.

It was a poor answer. I knew it was a poor answer when I said it.

The last Friday

I was up at 4:40, which is when I have been up for thirty years. Joanne already had the coffee made.

She handed me my lunch in the same brown sack. She kissed me on the cheek and told me not to be sentimental. I told her I was not going to be.

She had a look on her face I took for the start of a cold.

At the post office I cased the mail from seven to nine thirty, the way I always had, four hundred and twelve slots and my hands knowing every one. Tasha was working the next case over, and she did not look up, which I thought was kind of her.

I loaded the Jeep and pulled out at 9:40. And eleven minutes later I was standing in the road with a piece of tablet paper in my hand.

I read Hank’s note again. Wednesday, seven in the morning. Bring nothing.

I got back in the Jeep. I put Hank’s note in my shirt pocket, behind the memo book, and pulled forward to the next box. It was the Dillard place. The flag was down, because the Dillards are thirty-eight years old and have nothing to do with my list.

The one after that, the flag was down. The one after that, down. Then I came over the rise at the Wendell place, and both Wendell boxes had flags up. They have two boxes, because Nell and Opal will not share one. Both flags were straight up like a pair of raised hands.