The Mail I Hid From My Best Friend

Larkspur Court

Unit 11 had curtains.

A one-bedroom in Harbison, fourteen miles from Ketter, with a bed, a table, two chairs, and at the window a pair of yellow curtains Marybeth had run up on a machine over the weekend. I stood in the middle of the room and thought I did not deserve one stitch of it.

Armon was right about the oatmeal. At five the next morning he stood in my breezeway with a pot and two spoons and told me about the winter of 1952 on a hill he would not name, and a mule called Pearl. I said very little. He did not seem to need it.

Thursday Kaye picked me up and laid the seven envelopes on the blotter at her desk in the courthouse: two exam notices, two missed exams, a denial dated the fourteenth of October of last year, and a warning that I had one year to ask them to look again. The year was up on the fourteenth of October. I had three weeks left. If Kelvin had waited another month to open that sack, I would have had none.

“This is what the mail does,” Kaye said. “They send a letter, and a man who won’t open the letter never finds out they wanted to help.”

She filed the supplemental claim that afternoon. I do not yet know how it will come out. I do know I opened the next letter with a date on it standing at the mailboxes, with Armon watching, and I did not die.

The Card

On Monday, the nineteenth of October, I counted what I had. Three paychecks, minus rent, minus groceries, minus a pair of work boots. One hundred and eight dollars over. And in my wallet the napkin with the number on it. Nineteen hundred. I bought a blue card with a bird on the front at the Casey’s on the highway, because it was the only one that did not say Thank You or Get Well, and neither was mine to say.

I am not good at apology. What I had was a habit of being sorry in a general, drifting way, like weather. So I made it specific. I wrote the hundred dollars, and when the next one was coming, and that I had opened my mail. I did not write that I was sorry for what I said in that kitchen. It was too large, and a card is too small.

I put in five twenties. Doyle drove me to the post office and I mailed it at the window. I wanted the stamp on it. I wanted it to arrive the way real mail arrives, to a box, to be opened by someone who chose to.