The ice
At a quarter past five a Tahoe came up the track. It was Rick, with a sack of ice on his shoulder and a grin ready for the room.
He was three steps under the pavilion when he saw me at the head of the table with the ladle in my hand.
The grin stayed a moment after the rest of him changed. That was the awful part. It stayed on his face like a wet paint line.
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“Dee,” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming out.”
Nobody spoke. The fire popped in the barrel.
Otis Birdsong got up from the end of the bench.
I have known him my whole life. He carried Route Two for thirty-eight years and was never once wrong about whose mailbox was whose. He is eighty-four now, with a back like a question mark and hair as fine as milkweed, and he is the man who shook Walt’s hand in our driveway and handed him the first twenty-four hundred dollars.
“It’s her table, Rick,” Otis said. “It’s her ground.”
He said it gently. That was what made the room go still.
Rick laughed a little. “Sure it is, Otis. Hey, Dee, I was going to run by tomorrow and tell you about…”
Otis was not listening. He was looking at the red can beside the orange cap.
“Delia. What is this?”
“Walt’s stubs,” I said. “Thirty years of your checks. I thought the club might want to see where it went.”
He worked the lid off with his thumbs. The rubber band had gone brittle and broke when he touched it, and the stubs spilled into his hand like a deck of cards.
He sat down on Walt’s bench and put on his glasses. He found the oldest stub, soft as cloth, and held it up to the lantern on the post.
He read it silently first. I watched his mouth move. Then he read it aloud.
“October third, 1995. Twenty-four hundred dollars. And in Walt’s hand, in pencil: Taxes and the roof. Delia’s idea.”