He didn't answer for a long time.
Then he reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, the left side, over his heart, and took out an envelope. It was a plain square envelope, cream-colored, a little bent from being carried, the corners gone soft. And it was addressed, in blue ink, in a round, careful hand I would have known anywhere on earth, a hand that had signed my permission slips and written my name on my lunch bags and left notes on the counter that said Lasagna in fridge, 350 for 40 min, love you, Mom, to Mr. Virgil Haberle, at an address on East Sixth Street in Lawrence Park. There was a stamp on it. A Forever stamp with a picture of a lighthouse. It had never been mailed.
"She gave it to me two days before she died," Eamon said. "At hospice. She'd written it the week before. She made me promise to mail it. She said, 'Mail it after the funeral. Not before. I don't want him to come to the funeral, I'd die of embarrassment.' She actually made a joke." He turned the envelope over in his fingers. "That was eleven months ago."
"You didn't mail it."
"I came here to mail it. Today. That's why I'm in the suit at eleven in the morning, I told the office I had a dentist appointment. I came here to mail it and close the box and be done." He laughed again, that terrible laugh. "I've come here to mail it four times, Lark. In March. In June. On her birthday. I stood at the slot. I stood at the same slot he was standing at today. And I couldn't put it in. Every time, I couldn't. And today I walk in and he's standing at the slot. With you." He held the letter out over the console, not to me exactly, just out, in the air between us, like something he needed to put down and could not find a surface for. "I don't know what's in it. I never opened it. I don't know if she forgave him or told him to go to hell. Honestly I don't know which one would be worse."
I didn't take it. I want to be clear about that, because later Eamon would tell people that I took it out of his hand, and that isn't what happened. I looked at it, and I looked at him, and I said, "That's not mine to carry, Eamon. She gave it to you."
Then I opened my door and got out into the rain with the old man's cap.
The wind on Twenty-sixth Street came at me like somebody shoving through a crowd. I ran across at the light with my hood blown back and my sneakers filling up at every step, and by the time I got to the shelter my jeans were soaked to the knee and my hair was plastered across my face. The shelter was three panes of scratched plexiglass and a metal bench with armrests welded in to keep people from lying down on it. There was an ad on the back panel for a personal injury lawyer, a man with very white teeth and his arms folded, HURT IN A CRASH? CALL BAXTER. Virgil Haberle was sitting directly under Baxter with his hands folded on the head of his cane and rain dripping off the end of his crooked nose.
He saw me coming. He didn't get up. I don't think he could have, quickly. He just watched me come, the way you watch weather you can't do anything about.
I held out the cap.
He looked at it for a long moment. Then he took it with both hands. He tried to put it on and couldn't, the hands wouldn't cooperate, and I stood there in the rain and did not help him, and he tried again, and got it on crooked, and left it.