The post office on West Twenty-sixth Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, has a lobby the color of weak tea and a line that bends twice around a set of chrome posts and a sagging blue rope, and on the first Friday of October I stood in that line for twenty-two minutes holding a box of my dead mother's quilts against my chest like it was a child I was afraid to put down.
I want to be honest about my state of mind that morning, because a lot of what happened afterward depends on it. I was not a saint. I was not looking for a good deed. I was thirty years old, I had driven up from Columbus on Tuesday with a trunk full of collapsed cardboard and a roll of packing tape that kept losing its end, and I had spent three days in my mother's house on Liberty Street sorting her life into four piles labeled KEEP, GIVE, SELL, and I CAN'T. The I CAN'T pile was the biggest.
The quilts had been in it until about seven o'clock that morning, when my aunt Orla called from Scranton and said, in the voice she uses for funerals and car trouble, that she would like to have them, if nobody minded, because her sister had made two of them out of their own mother's housedresses and somebody ought to sleep under them who remembered the housedresses. So I had folded them into a moving box, taped it badly, written Orla's address on it in marker, and driven it down to the post office because I could not stand to look at it on the kitchen table anymore.
It was raining, which in Erie in October is less a weather event than a personality. The rain came in off the lake sideways and found the gap between your collar and your neck no matter how you stood. People came through the glass doors shaking themselves like dogs. The floor near the entrance had a yellow sandwich board on it that said CAUTION WET FLOOR in English and Spanish, and somebody had set a dripping umbrella against it so that the sign looked like it was holding the umbrella for a friend.
There were two windows open out of five. At the window on the left a young clerk with a shaved head and a nose ring was weighing an enormous box for a woman who wanted to know, over and over, whether it would get to Phoenix by Tuesday. At the window on the right was a woman I would come to know as Dorota Wierzbicki, though her name tag said only DOT, and in front of Dot was the old man.
I noticed him first because of his coat. It was a brown car coat with a corduroy collar, the kind my father wore in the one photograph of him I keep on my refrigerator, and it was at least two sizes too big for the man inside it. Now the shoulders of the coat stood out past his own shoulders like the eaves of a house, and his neck came up out of the collar thin and corded as a plucked bird's. He had a wool cap in one hand and a rubber-tipped aluminum cane hooked over the edge of the counter, and his other hand, his right hand, was trying to pick coins out of a plastic sandwich bag and lay them on the counter, and it could not do it.
I don't mean it was slow. I mean it could not do it. The hand shook in a way I recognized from work, a deep steady tremor, the kind that does not stop when you are resting, so that every time his fingers closed on a quarter the quarter jumped out of them like it was alive. He would get one, and lose it, and it would ring on the laminate and roll, and he would put the bag down to chase it with his left hand, and then the bag would tip, and more coins would spill, and he would stop and stand there breathing and start again.
"Sir," Dot said. "Sir. I can count it for you if you just push the whole bag over."
"I've got it," the old man said. His voice was deeper than I expected, rough and low, the voice of somebody who used to talk over machinery. "I've almost got it."
"It's just that there's a line."