Part 3 — The Post Office Box
“The post office box was rented in November of 2012 by Charlene,” the agent read, “and renewed each year with a money order. The signature on the rental form is hers.” My sister gripped the shelter pole with both hands, and her good coat fell open, and for one moment she looked like the thin girl in the photograph on my refrigerator, the two of us on the pier at Maumee Bay in 1974.
Nobody said anything. Then Charlene said, quite calmly, “I thought it would be kinder.” That is what she said, with a hundred and fifty letters between us on the curb. It had started, she explained, the month Danny left. Rusty had told her that the boy had gone to join a bad crowd in Detroit and would drag Wanda down with him. Rusty had said the best thing was to let him go and keep the letters from me, so that I would stop waiting and stop crying on the bus.
And she had believed him because she owed him. Her husband had been out of work that year, and Rusty had quietly paid her mortgage for eight months, with money that was mine. When Rusty came back each year to say the arrangement should go on, she went on. She told herself that Danny was safe, because the letters said he was. She never thought about what it was to be the mother who never got them.
The agent spoke gently to me then, because he had children of his own. The post office had noticed in September that an unusual number of letters addressed to one name were being collected from a single box by the same two people. A postal inspector in Toledo had followed the thread, and when the thread led to Bus 1147, they had called the FBI. “Mrs. Sikes, we are here for the letters, but we are also here because someone has been waiting very patiently to see you.”
He turned to the dark SUV. The back door opened. A man stepped out into the afternoon, a tall man with hair going gray at the temples and the same little crease between the eyebrows that I have. He was thirty-one years old. He had a gray tool bag over one shoulder, as though he had come straight from work, and he was shaking so hard that the strap trembled. “Mama,” said Danny. “I wrote and wrote.”
I do not remember crossing the curb. I remember the smell of his jacket, which was diesel and cold air, and the sound the whole terminal made, a long wet shout from people who had waved at me through a windshield for twenty-nine years. A woman from my 6:10 run was crying out loud. Somebody had started to clap, and somebody else told them to hush, and then nobody was hushing anybody.
He told me the rest in my kitchen that night. He had gone to Duluth in 2012 after an argument with Rusty at the depot, where Rusty had told him that his mother was ashamed of how he drove and that the family would be better off without him. He worked on the ore docks, then in a diesel shop, and eventually opened his own. He had written every month to the address Charlene gave him, never doubting that I read the letters and was too angry to answer. He had kept a list of every date, in a drawer, in case he ever needed to show someone.
The law took its course, and it was a patient course. Rusty was charged with federal counts for interfering with the mail and with a state count for theft by deception, and in the spring he pleaded guilty. The twenty-seven thousand five hundred dollars I had lent him came back by order of the court, together with twelve years of interest, from the sale of the tavern on Main Street. The judge, who had once driven a bus herself for a summer, gave him a sentence he could not talk his way out of.
Charlene was charged too, with a lesser count. She pleaded guilty and gave a long statement, and the judge gave her probation, a fine and a hundred hours of volunteer work at the very post office where she had rented the box. I did not go to the hearing. I went afterward to her house on a gray Sunday with a casserole. We sat for a long time. I said, “I will not say it was nothing.” She said, “I know.” We drank our coffee, and I let her hold my hand.
Bus 1147 was retired in June. The city gave me the driver seat as a retirement present, and I thought that was a funny gift until I remembered what had been behind it. The agent mailed me the canvas bag in a box. I did not open it again for a week. When I did, I read all hundred and fifty letters at the kitchen table in order, from 2012, and Danny sat across from me and let me.
A mother who drives for twelve years past the same empty house does not stop loving the child, she only learns to hold the wheel with both hands. The letters are in the bottom drawer with my sewing tin of church bulletins, forty-one dates in pencil. They are all the proof I ever kept, and I did not know that I was keeping it for him.
On the last Saturday of that June I sat on the porch at six in the morning and watched the east side of Toledo wake up. A bus went by on Front Street, Route 20, headed for the Westgate turnaround, and the driver, whom I did not know, lifted two fingers from the wheel. Danny came out in his socks with two cups of coffee and sat beside me. We did not say much. There was nowhere either of us had to be.