Then Emma worked the digger blades around the base, breaking up clods of clay for the backfill. Harold left his cane propped on the fence, went inside, and came out across the yard with a mug of coffee in each hand, his knit cap pulled down against the wind. He stood beside us, smiling, waiting for her to be done.
“One for you,” he said. “One for me. Your mother can have the next pot.”
“I’m not stopping,” Emma said.
“I know. That’s why I’m holding it for you.”
My arms ached from steadying that post. I did not mind. I wanted to stand there with my hands on it for as long as she would let me.
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By eleven the post stood straight and true. Emma tamped the last layer of dirt, and Harold measured forty-two inches from the road to the floor of the box and six inches back from the edge. “Right where the government wants it,” he said.
I thought that was the end. It was not.
“Now the numbers,” Harold said.
Emma frowned. “Mr. Mercer?”
“Lois’s brush is in the garage. The paint is probably dried up, but I have a can of white in the basement.” He looked at the mailbox. “I haven’t touched it since she died. I could not make my hands do it.”
“I can’t do it right,” Emma said. “I’ve never lettered anything.”
“I know. You’ll do it with me.” He cleared his throat. “My eyes aren’t what they were. Hold the brush, and I’ll tell you where.”
He told her where. She painted the four numbers on the side of that mailbox, tongue between her teeth, exactly the way he had said Lois did. I stood a little back, by the car, and let myself have the tears I had been holding since Thursday morning. I turned my face toward the corn so neither of them would see.
When she finished, the numbers were crooked, just a hair. Harold looked at them for a long moment with his hand on the lid.
“Perfect,” he said, and he meant it.
Emma had to leave for her shift. At the kitchen table she offered the envelope again, and Harold took one twenty from it, and no more. “For the taillight lens,” he said. “It’s a fifteen-dollar part, and I’ll keep the change for gas. We’re square.”
“It’s way more than that,” Emma said. “There’s the old box, and the post, and your morning.”
“Then I’ll owe you,” Harold said. “You come see me and we’ll settle up. I don’t take the rest of it from a girl who works for her money.”
She tried to argue. She did not get far. Harold is a man who has been wearing down arguments for eighty years.
I drove her to the diner without saying much, and she went in through the back door. When she hung up her coat, she found the envelope in the pocket of her apron. It had somehow gone in there while she was shaking his hand. Folded around the bills, on a sheet of Lois’s old stationery, were a few lines in an old man’s careful block letters.