The Mailbox My Daughter Paid For

“You’re the girl who left the note,” I heard him say. His voice carried better than I expected.

“Yes, sir,” Emma said. “Mr. Mercer, I came to make it right.”

Harold raised one hand. “Then answer me one thing first,” he said.

Emma went still.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

I think that is the moment I understood things were going to be all right. I watched my daughter’s shoulders come down about two inches.

“I work at the Maple Street Diner,” she said. “I’m around breakfast all the time.”

“That’s not what I asked.” He leaned on the cane. “I asked if you ate it. A girl who slides sideways off a road and goes home to read that nonsense does not eat breakfast. I’ve got coffee on, and cinnamon rolls my niece left. Come in, and bring your mother. She’s standing down there with a fence post like she’s guarding a bridge.”

I laughed in spite of myself. I walked up the drive and shook his hand, which was dry and enormous and a little unsteady.

His kitchen smelled of coffee and wood smoke. The table had two chairs and a third pulled up crooked to it, and a little wire basket of seed catalogs sat in the middle. He set the note down and smoothed it flat with his palm.

“I want to tell you about this paper,” he said.

Emma sat, and I sat, and Harold lowered himself into the third chair with a grunt and told us.

His niece Bernadette had driven him to Fort Wayne for his hip appointment that Thursday. They had left before six, and the first thing he noticed when they got home was that the mailbox was gone.

“I stood in my own yard and I thought, well, there goes the last of it,” he said.

“The last of what?” Emma asked.

“Lois put that box up in 1981. I set the post, but she picked the box, and she painted the numbers on the side every spring until the year she passed, two years ago. White paint, a little brush, tongue between her teeth. I haven’t been able to do it since.”

He stopped for a moment. The kitchen clock ticked.

“I was ready to be sore about it. Then I saw the note under my wiper.” He tapped it with one finger. “Two lines on a diner order pad. ‘I’m sorry. I will make this right.’ And a phone number, so I could find you.”

“I should have waited,” Emma said. “I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“You knocked first. You left a boot print on my mat.” He almost smiled. “I have had a great deal of mail since Lois died, and one piece of it said sorry. Everything else was a bill, or a magazine asking for money.”

Emma looked at the table. I saw her press her lips together, and I put my hand on her back.

“Bernadette showed me the town page that evening at my own table,” Harold said. “I don’t use that thing. She held it up in front of my face, and I read what that woman wrote.”

“That was my sister-in-law,” I said. “Mr. Mercer, I’m so sorry.”