"I've been on this window nine years," she said. "That man has come in here once a month the whole nine. Rain, snow, the time the lake froze over clear out to the breakwall. Not always to me. But I always noticed him." She put her glasses back on. "I don't know what's between you and him and I don't need to know. But he's eighty-one years old, and it's coming down sideways out there, and he can't get his hat on by himself."
"You don't know what he did," my brother said.
"No," said Dot. "And you don't know what he's done since. Neither one of us knows everything. That's all I'm saying." She looked at me, and at the cap in my hands. Then she went back behind her counter, and lifted the little half-door and let it drop behind her with a bang, and said, "Next," in a voice like a gavel, and the man in the Bills jacket jumped.
Mack was still standing there with his certified envelopes. He had the look of a man who has said something careless at a funeral. He looked at the doors, and at the cap, and at me. "Is the old guy all right?" he said. "I didn't— I was just in a hurry. I got a pour at noon."
"I know," I said.
"I'd have paid it. The six bucks. If I'd known." He rubbed his goatee. "Probably I wouldn't have. But I'd like to think so."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and after a second he turned back to the counter.
I looked at my brother. He looked at me. Around us the post office started up again, slowly, the way a room does after somebody drops a tray of glasses: people coughing, shifting, deciding not to have seen. The machine behind Dot cleared its throat. The young clerk on the left asked the woman about Phoenix whether she wanted insurance.
"Eleven eighty-seven," I said.
Eamon closed his eyes.
"That's yours?" I said. "Box eleven eighty-seven? That's you? He just mailed that to you?"
"It was Mom's," he said. "It's mine now." He opened his eyes. "Not here, Lark. Please. Not in front of the whole— Not here."
He picked up his briefcase. I picked up my box of quilts from where the woman with the toddler had nudged it to the edge of the line, and she gave me a look of pure, uncomplicated sympathy, a stranger's look, and said, "You want me to watch it?" and I said, "No, thank you," and carried it out into the rain behind my brother with the old man's cap balanced on the top of it.
I looked for Virgil Haberle in the parking lot. I couldn't help it. The rain was coming in hard off the lake in long gray sheets, and across Twenty-sixth Street I could see the glass bus shelter, and in it a figure in a brown coat sitting on the bench with his head bowed and his cane between his knees. Just sitting. Getting rained on even inside the shelter, because the wind was blowing straight through it.
"Get in the car," Eamon said.