Something happened to his face then that I did not understand for a long time. I thought at first that he was just startled, the way people are when you speak to them low and close. But it was more than that. The color went out of him all at once, from his forehead down, like somebody had pulled a plug. His mouth opened. His pale eyes moved over my face, very slowly, from my hair to my eyes to my chin, and stopped on my chin, where I have a small white scar shaped like a fishhook that I mostly forget about until somebody stares at it. He stared at it. The pen in his hand had stopped shaking. I mean it had actually stopped, for maybe three seconds, which I did not know at the time was a kind of miracle.
"What did you say?" he whispered.
"I said look at me." I kept my voice even. Dispatcher voice. "Not at them. They don't matter. It's just you and the paper. Take your time."
He kept looking at me. Then he swallowed, and looked down at the paper, and wrote. The hand shook again, but he wrote, slowly, a little at a time, bracing against my fingers, and I did not look at what he was writing because it was not mine to look at. When he was done he folded the money order once, and then again, and slid it into an envelope that he had brought already addressed and stamped, and sealed it by pressing the flap down with the side of his fist, three times, hard.
The envelope lay face up on the counter for a second before he picked it up, and I did see the front of that, because it was right there. His handwriting was large and spidery and slanted backward as if leaning away from a wind. It said BOX HOLDER, and under that P.O. BOX 1187, and under that ERIE PA 16508. That was all. No name.
I remember thinking it was the loneliest address I had ever seen.
"Mail slot's around the corner," Dot said, softer now. "Or I can take it."
"I'll put it in myself," he said. "Thank you, Dorota."
So he knew her name, and not from the tag. I filed that away. He reached for his cane and missed it, and I unhooked it from the counter and put it in his left hand, and he leaned on it and turned, and for a moment we were standing very close together, him and me, in front of the whole silent line.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
"You said that already."