“Read it out loud, Lynette,” I said, and I slid the certified envelope across the table to my daughter. “I would like to hear how it sounds.” Her hand shook. She read the line about the policy on the life of Opaline Riggs, and then she read the next line, and the next, and the color drained out of her face. “Owner and sole beneficiary, Gordon Wayne Pruett,” she whispered. “Monthly premium, four hundred twelve dollars. Date of application, 2022.” Her husband sat across from her, staring at the tablecloth. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked off an entire minute before anybody breathed.
Marcus laid the second copy beside it, the one he had pulled from the glove box of the truck of his uncle, and the paper rustled in the silence. “Grandma, there is more,” he said. “The application is signed with your name. The doctor exam is dated a Tuesday, and you were in bed with the flu that whole week.” He looked at Gordon for a long moment. “Somebody sat in that clinic and called himself you, or sent a woman who looked like you,” he said. “And the premium was paid from the same post office box where the settlement check of my grandfather went.” Gordon stood up, then sat down again.
Gordon found his voice, and it was thin as paper. “Opaline, it was an investment,” he said. “Everybody does it. Policies on older relatives, so the family is protected.” I folded my hands. “Gordon, a family is protected when the person gets to sign,” I said. “Not when a man in a truck signs for her.” Miss Earline, who had delivered my mail for twenty two years, stood in the kitchen doorway with her satchel on her shoulder, because I had asked her to stay. “Mr. Pruett, I have already taken a copy to the postal inspector,” she said. “He is parked outside.” Nobody moved.
A certified envelope left on a kitchen table gave one grandmother the weekend to bring her daughter back to the house in Natchez.
I gave my terms in a steady voice, the same voice that once talked a buyer in Memphis out of a bad contract. The policy would be cancelled that afternoon, and the insurance company had already agreed to flag it as fraud. The post office box on Highway 61 would be closed, and the settlement checks from Clarence would come to my own mailbox again. Lynette and Gordon would leave my house within sixty days. And the sixty nine thousand dollars that had gone into that box would be repaid, with every receipt, within five years, or I would hand the whole file to the county attorney myself.
Lynette began to cry. She is fifty one years old, and she sat there like a child. “Mama, I did not know about the policy,” she said. “I swear to you on Daddy. I knew about the mail. I told myself you did not need it.” I let her finish. “You knew about the mail, baby,” I said. “That was enough. You watched me eat soup from a can while you drove a new car.” She nodded, and she wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I will leave him,” she said, and I told her that was a decision she should make for herself, in her own time.
The postal inspector took Gordon out through the front door that evening, not in handcuffs, but with a polite hand on his elbow and a folder under his arm. Marcus carried my suitcase from the back room to the big bedroom, the one I had slept in with Clarence for forty four years. He opened the window, and the smell of magnolia drifted across the quilt. “Grandma, I have been checking the mail every Thursday since I came home for Christmas,” he said. “I did not want to say anything until I was sure.” I took his face in both hands and kissed his forehead.
That night I could not sleep, so I went out to the porch in my robe and sat in the swing with a cup of tea. The street was empty and the porch light drew moths. Miss Earline came walking up the sidewalk at midnight, still in her postal jacket, because she had not been able to sleep either. She sat down beside me without being asked. “Miss Opaline, thirty years I have carried other people bad news,” she said. “I never carried any I was so glad to deliver.” We rocked together in the dark, two old women who had been through a great deal, and we laughed until the swing creaked.
The money consequences arrived in stages. Gordon sold the truck and a fishing boat, and he took a second mortgage on the car lot of his brother. He signed a plea agreement in the fall, with restitution and three years of probation. Lynette moved into a rented duplex near the river and took a job at the courthouse. The first payment arrived on the fifth of the month, in an envelope with a stamp in the corner, and in the memo line, she had written, For the porch light. I understood. She was telling me that she was coming home, a little at a time.
In the name of Clarence, who passed six years ago and who spent thirty years on offshore rigs in the Gulf, I started the Clarence Riggs Mailbox Fund. It pays for postal box fees, large print forms and a visit from a volunteer once a month for elderly people in Adams County who rely on a check in the mail and cannot check it themselves. In the first year, we helped one hundred seven people. A widow in a wheelchair held up her first untouched envelope and said, “I had forgotten what it looks like when it is mine.”
In May, Marcus graduated from Alcorn State with a degree in accounting. I sat in the front row in my blue church dress, and when they read his name, I stood up before anyone else did. That evening I took out my old drawing table and sat down for the first time in years. I designed a card that read, For the grandson who looked in the mailbox, and I painted a small brass key on the cover. I mailed it to him myself, from the post office downtown, and Miss Earline hand stamped it.