I started to reach for it. Then I stopped.
"I think Eamon should read it," I said.
My brother looked at me as if I had slapped him.
"She gave it to you," I said. "You carried it. Four times to the slot. You should be the one."
"Lark—"
"I'm not saying it to punish you. I'm saying it because I think if you don't, you'll stand at that slot for the rest of your life."
The wind blew rain in through the open side of the shelter. My brother stood there with his umbrella dripping. Then, slowly, he leaned the umbrella against the plexiglass under Baxter's white teeth, and held out his hand, and Virgil Haberle put our mother's letter into it.
Eamon opened it with his thumb, carefully, along the top, the way she always opened her own mail, the way he must have learned from watching her. There was one sheet inside, folded in thirds. Our mother's stationery, the cream kind with a narrow green border she bought at the Hallmark on Peach Street in packs of twenty and used only for sympathy notes and complaints to the gas company. He unfolded it. I saw the round blue handwriting from where I sat, filling the page edge to edge, no margins, the way she wrote when she had a lot to say and didn't want to waste paper.
He read it out loud. He read the first line, and his voice held. Then it didn't.
I'm going to put the letter down here the way she wrote it. Eamon gave me a photocopy later, and I have it in the drawer of my nightstand in Columbus, next to the mug that says LOOK AT ME, NOT AT THEM, which I took home from work and do not drink out of anymore.
Dear Mr. Haberle,