He was looking at me. His eyes were wet, but he was not crying. He was standing as straight as he could stand on his cane in his enormous coat, and he was not looking away, and I understood, in the part of me that has listened to ten thousand strangers on the worst days of their lives, that he was not looking away on purpose. That he believed he did not have the right to look away.
The white scar through his eyebrow. The broken nose. The jaw that had been heavy once, under all that loose skin.
"Lark," he said. My name, in his mouth. He said it like it hurt. "Little Lark. You had a pink coat. With a hood that had ears on it. Like a bear."
I had had a pink coat with bear ears on the hood. It was in a box in my mother's attic. I had taken it out on Wednesday and held it and put it in the I CAN'T pile.
"Don't," Eamon said again, but it came out cracked this time, broken right down the middle.
"I'm sorry," Virgil Haberle said to me. Just that. Not a speech. "I'm sorry."
And then he turned, on his cane, and walked past my brother toward the doors, cane and foot, cane and foot, through the hush of that whole tea-colored room, and my brother stepped back to let him pass the way you step back from something on fire, and the doors opened, and the old man went out into the rain without his cap on, because it had fallen off when he turned and was lying on the floor by my feet.
I bent and picked up the cap. It was gray wool, pilled, with a Wabtec Locomotive logo stitched on the front and a smell of wintergreen inside it. I stood holding it in both hands.
For a while nobody in the post office said anything. Then Dot came out from behind her counter. I didn't know they were allowed to do that. She came out through a little half-door at the end, with her glasses still in her hand, and she walked over to my brother, who had not moved, and she stood in front of him and looked up into his face, because she was a small woman and he is not a small man.
"Mr. Fennessy," she said. "You're the box holder on eleven eighty-seven."
He looked at her as if he had forgotten there were other people in the world. "Yes."