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."
That was when I felt it. Before anybody explained anything. I felt it in my stomach first, a dropping sensation, like the first second on a roller coaster, the moment after the crest when your body understands what is about to happen before your mind has been informed. Because the old man had said our name. Not my name. Our name. And he had said it the way you say the name of a judge.
"Lark," my brother said. His voice was perfectly level. He has a voice for this. It is a voice that does not rise and does not fall. It is a voice that walks. "Lark. Come here, please."
"What's going on? Do you two know each other?"
"Come over here. Now. Please."
"Eamon, what—"
"Step away from him." For the first time, the voice rose. Not much. A half step. But I had never in my life heard my brother raise his voice to me, not once, not when I was a teenager and crashed his car into the Wegmans cart return, not when I told him I was moving to Ohio, not at our mother's funeral when I could not stop laughing at the wrong time and had to leave the church. "Step away from him, Lark."
I didn't. I don't know why I didn't. Maybe because the old man was shaking now worse than he had been at the counter, his whole body, so that the rubber tip of his cane squeaked against the wet floor. Maybe because I already knew, somewhere, and as long as I stood still the knowing could not catch up with me.