Krista looked at me. There was a second, a very small one, where her face did nothing at all, and then she smiled and said, "That's amazing, Mare. Seriously." And she came over and kissed the top of my head, which she hadn't done in about four years, and then she went upstairs, and I heard her door close.
I've thought a lot about that second. At the time I thought she was just tired. She was always tired that fall. She was a sophomore at Northlake State, pre-nursing, on the Lake Promise Scholarship, which pays for everything as long as you keep a 2.5 and take fifteen credits, and she left the house every morning at ten after seven with her backpack and her thermos and came home every afternoon between three and four, and she said almost nothing about it. Last year she'd talked about it constantly. Her anatomy professor who wore a bow tie. The cadaver lab and how it smelled. A girl named Brianna from Corry who was going to be her roommate if they ever got the money to live on campus. Last year she'd sat at the kitchen table every night with her flash cards, hundreds of them, color-coded index cards in a shoebox, rubber-banded in stacks, and made me quiz her, and I learned the names of all the bones in the hand without wanting to. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. I can still say them. This year she didn't sit at the kitchen table. This year she went upstairs.
I didn't think about it much. That's the honest truth. I was busy. I was sixteen and a junior and I worked three afternoons a week and Saturdays at Szczepanski Frame and Art on Peach Street, cutting mats and sweeping and learning to do gold leaf, and every other hour of my life I was on the dining room floor with the panel and my shoeboxes of paper.
I had eleven shoeboxes. They were labeled in Sharpie on masking tape. REDS. BRICK. BLUES (SKY). BLUES (OTHER). WHITES. YELLOWS/LIGHT. SKIN. BROWNS. GREENS. BLACKS/DARK. WEIRD. The weird box had things in it like a piece of foil from a Hershey's Kiss and a page from a Bible I found in a free box outside the Methodist church and the paper sleeve from my mother's first paycheck stub when she made full-time carrier, which she had kept in a drawer for nineteen years and which she let me have, and which I had not used yet because I was saving it for something important.
I got paper everywhere. I got it from the free boxes, and from the frame shop's scrap bin, and from the newspapers that piled up on Mrs. Gorski's porch next door after she went into the nursing home, which her son said I could take. I got it from waiting rooms. I tore the inside covers off old library-sale paperbacks. I picked up flyers off telephone poles. And I got it, every Tuesday night, from our blue recycling bin in the garage, before my mother wheeled it to the curb.
My mother thought this was hilarious. "My daughter the raccoon," she'd say, when she found me in the garage with my phone flashlight and the bin tipped over. "You find anything good in there, you let me know. Maybe a winning lottery ticket. Maybe my youth."
She's a letter carrier. She's been with the post office for twenty-two years, and for the last fourteen she's had the same route, City Route 19, out past Glenwood Park, eight hundred and some stops, half of it walking. She knows every dog on it by name and which houses get oxygen tank deliveries and which old men wait on their porches for her because she is the only person they'll talk to that day. She knows the weight of a birthday card with money in it. She can tell from across a room what kind of envelope something is, a bill or a jury summons or a check or a letter from a prison, just from the color and the window and the way it's sealed. "Everybody's whole life comes through the slot," she says. "You learn to read it from the outside. You don't open it. You just know."
She also, that fall, hardly ever got home before nine. The post office was short-staffed, the way it's been short-staffed for my whole life, and in October the regular carriers were all getting forced to stay and help cover the routes that didn't have anybody on them, so she'd finish Route 19 and then go out again with a headlamp and do half of somebody else's. She came home with her feet swollen and ate standing up and went to bed. She was home when we left in the morning, sometimes, if she wasn't forced in early. Otherwise we were mostly a house of notes on the counter. Mare — chicken in the crockpot. K — did you call about the inhaler. Love you both, Mom. Sometimes just a heart.
So that's the house. That's who was in it. That's what was on the floor.