Everyone looked toward the doorway as I walked in, and the postal inspector stood up and pulled a chair out for me, which is not a thing I had expected and which told me how the morning was going to go.
Every piece of mail in this country gets scanned. People know that and they still forget what it means.
That parcel was scanned at the processing plant on Kansas Avenue at 3:04 in the morning. It was scanned again on the sorting belt at 4:41. And then it was never scanned onto my vehicle, never scanned as delivered, never scanned as attempted, and my scanner’s own GPS history has me eleven blocks away at the time somebody’s hand was on it.
I never touched that package. The machine says so, and the machine has said so since the day it disappeared, and it took a new postmaster three weeks and a public accusation to get somebody to pull the report.
The inspector pulled it in an afternoon. He also pulled sixteen months of parcel exceptions on that plant, because inspectors do not look at one thing.
Forty-one parcels. All of them small, all of them insured, all of them jewelry or coins or phones, all of them going dark between the belt and the dock, and all of them on the same tour with the same two clerks working.
They arrested one of them in February. The other one is cooperating and I am not going to say more than that.
The postmaster sat through it. When the inspector finished, he asked to speak and he apologized to me by name in that conference room in front of eleven people, and he said the words twenty-nine years and no complaints, and he did not try to explain why he’d said what he said in the sorting room.
Then a woman from the union read one thing into the record, which was a note that came in on my route in 2011 and that a supervisor had put in my file and that I had never seen.
My mother is ninety-one and she gets nine letters a year. Your carrier walks them to her door and hands them to her instead of putting them in the box, and stands there a minute so she can tell him about her garden. She talks about him more than she talks about her own sons. Somebody at the post office ought to know that.
I remember the woman. I did not know she had written anybody.
They gave me my route book and my badge back and eleven days of pay, and the neighborhood found out somehow, which in that part of Topeka takes about four hours, and there were people on their porches the first afternoon I came back down Boswell.
Mrs. Elam still gets her letters handed to her at the door. She’s ninety-five now. She still talks about her garden.