"Well," I said, "you made it."
He turned and looked at me then. Really looked. It was the look of a man reading something written very small.
"Yes," he said. "Thanks to you."
I have gone over the next part so many times that I no longer trust my memory of the order of things. I know the glass doors opened behind us, because I felt the cold wet air on the back of my neck. I know the CAUTION WET FLOOR sign rattled. I know the old man was facing the doors and I was facing him, so he saw first. I saw his eyes go past my shoulder and widen and then go absolutely flat and still, the way an animal goes still in a field when a shadow passes over it.
Then I turned around, and it was my brother.
Eamon was standing just inside the doors with rain on his shoulders. He had on the charcoal suit he wears to court, the one I helped him pick out four years ago at the Macy's at the Millcreek Mall when he made assistant district attorney, and a navy tie with small white anchors on it that our mother bought him because she thought anchors were funny on a man who got seasick on the Presque Isle ferry. He was carrying his leather briefcase in one hand and a closed black umbrella in the other, still dripping. He had stopped walking in the middle of a step. His back foot was still lifted slightly at the heel.
I smiled. I actually smiled. I lifted my hand and gave him a little wave, the dumb wave you give when you run into your sibling somewhere unexpected, a wave that means "Hey, look at us, small world, small city." I had been staying in his guest room all week. It did not seem strange to me that he would be at a post office. People mail things.
He did not wave back.
He did not move at all. He was looking past me, at the old man, and then at me, and then at the old man, and then at the space between us, which was nothing, eighteen inches of tea-colored air, and his face was doing something I had never seen my brother's face do in thirty years. It had gone white around the mouth. There was a muscle jumping along his jaw. His hand on the briefcase handle had tightened until the leather creaked, and I heard it creak from fifteen feet away, because the whole lobby had gone quiet. Even the toddler had stopped crying. Even the woman at the left window had stopped asking about Phoenix.
"Eamon?" I said.
Behind me the old man said, very softly, "Mr. Fennessy."