We sat.
"Why the notes?" I said finally. "Eamon said you sent notes with the money orders. The weather. And the sober thing. Still sober, so many years."
He was quiet a moment. "Your mother wrote to me once," he said. "In twenty twelve. I'd been sending the money orders about three years then, with letters. Long letters. Apologies. Pages of them. How sorry I was. How I thought about it every day. And she wrote back, one page, and said stop." The corner of his mouth moved. "She said, 'Stop sending me money and stop telling me you're sorry. I know you're sorry. Your sorry doesn't do anything for me. It's a thing you're carrying, and you are trying to hand it to me, and I have enough to carry.'"
That sounded so much like my mother that I made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"And she said," he went on, "'If you have to write to me, write me something true that isn't about that day. And tell me if you are still sober. Because if you go back to drinking, then he died for nothing, and I will not have that.'" He turned the cane a little in his hands. "So I did what she said. Except for the money. I couldn't stop the money. I tried for one month and I couldn't sleep. I figured she could throw them away. I figured that was her right."
"She didn't throw them away."
He turned and looked at me.
"She kept them," I said. "All of them. In a boot box in her closet. Eamon found them after she died. She never cashed one. But she kept every single one. And the notes. In order."
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.