I watched that go into him. I watched it the way you watch a stone go into a pond, the ripples going out and out across his face. His mouth opened. His eyes filled up. He looked down at his hands on the head of the cane, and his hands started shaking again, worse than ever, so that the cane rattled against the concrete, and he did not try to stop them.
"Why would she do that?" he whispered.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't think I'll ever know. But I think maybe she wanted to know you were still alive. And still sober. Every month. I think maybe that was the only thing about it she could stand to keep checking on."
The glass door of the post office swung open across the street. I saw it through the water on the plexiglass, a dark shape coming out, a black umbrella going up. The umbrella came down the steps and to the curb and stood there at the light for a long time, long enough for the light to go green and red and green again, and then it crossed.
Virgil saw him too. He straightened on the bench as much as he could. He took his hands off the cane and put them flat on his knees, as if he were in a courtroom, waiting for the jury to come back in.
My brother stepped into the shelter and lowered the umbrella. Rain ran off it onto the concrete. He looked at me, and at the armrest between us, and at the old man. He didn't sit. He stood at the open end of the shelter with the wind tugging at his suit coat and his tie with the little anchors on it lifting and settling against his shirt, and he held out the cream-colored envelope.
Not to me. To Virgil.
"My mother wrote this to you," he said. "Before she died. She asked me to mail it. I didn't." His jaw was tight. "I'm not going to apologize for that. I'm just telling you. I didn't mail it, and I should have, and that's mine. It's been eleven months. It's yours."
Virgil looked at the envelope. He looked at it the way I have seen people look at a phone that is ringing with a number they know is the hospital. He reached for it. His hand was shaking so hard he couldn't close his fingers on it, and the envelope fluttered between my brother's fingers and his like a moth, and for a second I thought it would fall into the puddle on the floor of the shelter. Then Virgil got hold of it with both hands and pulled it in against his chest.
He held it there. He didn't open it. He couldn't have, I think, even if he'd tried.
"Would you," he said. He looked at me. "Would you read it to me? My eyes. And my hands. I can't. I'd like to know what it says before— I'd like to know."