My brother stepped into the shelter and lowered the umbrella. Rain ran off it onto the concrete. He looked at me, and at the armrest between us, and at the old man. He didn't sit. He stood at the open end of the shelter with the wind tugging at his suit coat and his tie with the little anchors on it lifting and settling against his shirt, and he held out the cream-colored envelope.
Not to me. To Virgil.
"My mother wrote this to you," he said. "Before she died. She asked me to mail it. I didn't." His jaw was tight. "I'm not going to apologize for that. I'm just telling you. I didn't mail it, and I should have, and that's mine. It's been eleven months. It's yours."
Virgil looked at the envelope. He looked at it the way I have seen people look at a phone that is ringing with a number they know is the hospital. He reached for it. His hand was shaking so hard he couldn't close his fingers on it, and the envelope fluttered between my brother's fingers and his like a moth, and for a second I thought it would fall into the puddle on the floor of the shelter. Then Virgil got hold of it with both hands and pulled it in against his chest.
He held it there. He didn't open it. He couldn't have, I think, even if he'd tried.
"Would you," he said. He looked at me. "Would you read it to me? My eyes. And my hands. I can't. I'd like to know what it says before— I'd like to know."
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.