Off-Season Delivery

The breakup was six weeks old and I was still doing the math on it. Six weeks since Carlo sat on the edge of my bed with his shoes already on, which I think tells you most of what you need to know about him, and said we'd grown apart. We'd grown apart. I was twenty-three, he was twenty-five, we'd been together since I was twenty, and apparently we'd been growing apart the whole time without either of us noticing.

The worst part, or maybe the best part, was that he'd been decent about it. No cheating, no yelling. Just a man with his shoes on telling me the truth at the worst possible speed.

I was sorting mail at the Sandpiper Cove post office on a Tuesday in November, and I was doing a bad job of it. The town empties out after Labor Day, so the volume's easy, which left me plenty of time to stand at my case and stare at a padded envelope I had no business staring at.

The red babydoll was in there. The one Carlo bought me in September, back when we were still pretending September was a normal month. I'd kept the receipt in my wallet for a month trying to return it, and then one morning I woke up and decided no, that wasn't the move. You don't return a thing like that. You spend it. You wear it once, somewhere it never belonged, and then you let it go. So I'd folded it into a padded envelope and addressed it to nobody at 24 Shore Road, one of the empty off-season rentals, and dropped it in the outgoing tray like a message in a bottle.

That was the plan, anyway. The plan had a hole in it, which I'll get to.

The envelope was addressed to 24 Shore Road. Somebody at the plant had smudged the barcode and the OCR had done its best, and its best was wrong, so the thing bounced back to my case twice. Third time I just wrote it out by hand and told myself I'd deal with it on the route.

"Case's clean, Horn."

Ross Carmichael. Postal clerk, twenty-six, been at the Sandpiper Cove branch about as long as me. He had that way of showing up next to you without any footstep noise, like a big quiet cat in a postal uniform.

"I know," I said. "I'm admiring it."

"You've been admiring that one envelope for ten minutes." He nodded at the padded thing. "That's not admiring, that's haunting."

"It's a bad address."

"Shore Road?"

"Twenty-four."

He leaned over and looked, close enough that I could smell the coffee on him. "That's a mis-sort. Twenty-four Shore Road is four houses up from forty-two. I can run the adjustment with you, if you want company on that loop. Off-season route's kind of depressing alone."

"I'm fine," I said.

And I was fine, sort of. Fine in the way where you're fine until somebody asks twice. He raised his hands like I'd drawn on him and went back to the counter, and I stood there feeling like I'd kicked a dog that had offered to walk me home.

Here's the part I didn't tell him. Shore Road was not on my route. It was on the loop I'd traded for this month, the empty rental row by the old marina, because the marina lot was where I ate lunch and the trade saved me four minutes. The envelope was going to 24, an empty rental, and I had constructed a whole righteous justification for it, something about hand-delivering properly, and I will not pretend the justification survived contact with daylight. It didn't. It was a flimsy little raft and I was paddling it anyway.

Lunch came at eleven, because off-season means the town runs on whatever schedule nobody objects to. I drove the truck out to the marina lot and shut it off and sat with the envelope on my knees.

The old marina in November is the quietest place on earth, I think. Docks with no boats, a locked bait shack, wind coming off the water with nothing in its way. I used to eat lunch out here with Carlo in the summer, once, early on, back when we still did things like that. I remembered him pointing at a pelican and I could not remember what he'd said about it. Six weeks and the pelican comment was already gone. That felt like proof of something. I decided not to examine what.

I tore the envelope open.

The babydoll was exactly as red as it had been in the boutique, a red so confident it embarrassed everything near it. Lace at the hem, thin straps, the whole joke. He'd bought it a size too small because he always guessed a size too small, and I'd worn it once and pretended it fit and pretended harder than I'd ever pretended about anything.

I put it on under my uniform in the truck, which is a sentence I did not expect to type. It was cold in there and the lace did nothing about that. The thing fit better than I remembered, or I'd gotten thinner, which is a breakup perk nobody warns you costs this much. I tucked my shirt down over it and looked in the mirror and there I was, a mail carrier in a bright red secret, about to do something with no upside I could name.

"So this is what getting over it looks like," I said to the mirror. The mirror didn't argue.

I delivered the rest of the loop first, which I want noted was very professional of me. Packages to the bait shop guy, letters to the woman with the loud dog, all of it correct. Then I drove to Shore Road.

The rental row sits at the end where the street gives up and becomes dunes. Four houses, pale and shuttered, then the marina road. Twenty-four had a gray truck in the drive, so somebody was home, which meant my plan required nobody home, which meant I'd have to be quick.

I took the envelope, and the note I'd written on the back of a delivery slip, and walked up to forty-two instead. The porch had one plastic chair and a wind chime that worked overtime. I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder, and stood there in the wind with my heart doing something unprofessional. Alisha, I told myself, you are delivering mail. It is the one thing you are certified