The Mail I Hid From My Best Friend

The Twenty-Eighth

I did not sleep Monday, or Tuesday. I lay in Unit 11 and unfolded the carbon on the blanket. It was the wrong time and my only time. On Wednesday Doyle drove me to Ketter, because Lysle said so before I asked.

At ten to six the sky over Ketter was going to slate. Doyle turned his pickup in at the foot of the Dunphys’ drive and stopped with the engine running. He put his cane across his knees and looked straight out the windshield.

I got down. No duffel. No box. I had my cap in my left hand and my wallet open in my right, and I walked to the bottom of the porch steps, the ones I had fixed, and stopped, because the bottom step felt like a line painted on a floor.

Kelvin was in the doorway. Em came out behind him drying her hands.

“Kel,” I said. “I owe you one more thing. It’s older than the couch.”

Em turned on the porch light.

I took the paper out and held it in both hands, the way you hold something you are afraid will fall apart. It was folded to the size of a stick of gum and the color of weak tea. I held it up to him.

He came down two steps. He took it and unfolded it, one fold and one and one, and held it under the porch bulb.

It took him a long time. I watched a man who reads grain tickets for a living read one short line, slowly, twice, then the signature, the initials, the date: the eighteenth of July, 1991.

Em came down beside him and read over his arm. She put her hand over her mouth.

“Fourteen points,” Kelvin said.

“Fourteen.”

“You were ahead of me by fourteen points.”

“Bruner told me. Yes.”

“And you took your name off.”

“I did.”

“And told me,” he said, and his voice did something, “the board went with me.”

“Board’s the board. I’d rather drive.” I tried to say it the old way. It came out like gravel.