The literacy council met in the basement on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The coordinator, a tiny ferocious woman named Shawnda who wore reading glasses on her head and another pair on her nose, had sat Starla down and given her a test that made her want to throw up, and then had said, "I've got just the man."
The man had been a mail carrier. He had come in that first Tuesday still in his blue uniform pants, with this brown corduroy jacket over his uniform shirt, and he had sat down across from her and taken a rubber-banded stack of index cards out of his left pocket and set them on the table between them, and he had not opened them. He had folded his hands on top of them.
"Before we do anything," he had said, "I'm going to tell you something about me, so we're even."
"Okay," Starla had said, not sure where to look.
"I carried mail on Route 14 for a lot of years. Down by the river. Lot of old folks down there. And there was a man on Route 14 named Mr. Rudell Tillman, who'd been in Korea, and who met me at his box every day at eleven-forty, rain or shine, for six years." He had tapped the cards. "Every day he'd say, 'Anything good, Johnson?' And I'd say, 'Light bill, Mr. Tillman,' or 'Letter from your sister.' And he'd take it and say thank you and go inside. And one day in the summer of 1990 he asked me if I'd mind reading the letter from his sister to him, because he'd left his glasses in the house. And I did. And the next week he'd left them in the house again." He had looked at her, and she remembered that his eyes then had been very sharp and very blue. "Six years, Mrs. Beasley. He'd been leaving his glasses in the house for six years, and I'd never once noticed, because I didn't know what I was looking at. When he died his sister came down from Louisville and found a whole kitchen drawer of letters he'd never been able to open. I started coming here that fall. So I want you to know two things. I know what the glasses trick is. And I'm not going to let you use it on me."
Starla had sat very still. And then, to her own horror, she had begun to laugh, and then to cry, and then both at once, and Arvel Johnson had pushed a box of library tissues across the table and waited, as if he had all the time in the world, which on Tuesday and Thursday nights from seven until nine, it turned out, he did.