he next morning after breakfast, Mrs. Delavecchio gave me a pack of stamps and an envelope. I told her I’d pay her back as soon as I got some coins from my coin purse, but she waved her hand and told me she’d bought those stamps ages ago and they lasted forever, showing me the little P in the stamp’s corner rather than a value.

“I can’t remember what I paid when I bought these,” she said. “Just take them. I give.”

“Thanks,” I said. I sat at the dining table and wrapped my arm protectively around everything. I needn’t have been so paranoid; incuriosity was one of Mrs. Delavecchio’s more useful traits, and she wasn’t interested in to whom I was sending a letter.

I dashed out the door and ran all the way (not actually that far, since the mailbox sat where our street met the road, only four duplexes down from Mrs. Delavecchio’s house). I needed my letter to get to Lem as soon as possible, and I couldn’t trust that an ambitious postal worker wouldn’t decide to make her rounds early today. Even a delay of one day was too long to postpone Mrs. Delavecchio’s and Lem’s reconciliation.

Panting (I really needed to work on my endurance), I pushed the letter into the mailbox. It slid so seamlessly into the slot that I would have guessed something had pulled it from the inside. I flipped open the slot’s metal tongue with my finger and peered in. The inside was dark and motionless.

“You’re just overexcited,” I told myself. “You’re imagining things. Did you think you’d peer in and see a disembodied hand grabbing the mail?”

I let the tongue fall with a metal clank, but kept staring warily at the mailbox. Obviously, the only way to be certain the box contained nothing untoward was to wait for the truck to come and collect the mail. Nine o’clock, the schedule on the box said.

“No,” I told myself. To spend the next seventy-five minutes waiting for the mail pickup would be thinking only of my own needs, and I’d promised myself I was going to spend the day with Mrs. Delavecchio to make up for the day before. I’d help her with some chores, we’d bake something tasty together, maybe do some gardening, watch some television. Add that to my reuniting Mrs. Delavecchio and her son and I’d be making a good start at refuting her claim that I was too busy to notice the needs of people around me.

“Godspeed, letter,” I whispered to the mailbox. “Godspeed.”

As I walked by my house, our porch light flicked from on to off. My mother must have come home. But after the previous day’s strange conversations and the discovery of my mauled notebook, my mother was the last person I felt like interacting with before eight in the morning. So I went back to Mrs. Delavecchio.

“Why are you back here?” she asked as soon as I came in.

“I thought we’d spend the day together. The school is still closed.” I added the lie quickly. “I could help you with some chores, if you’d like.”

“But why? Your mother is home.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. A light bulb turning off didn’t necessarily mean someone had turned it off. The bulb could have burned out. There might be a localized power failure. Faeries. Any old reason.

“I see her inside your house. So you go.”

“She’s probably just picking up something between shifts. I don’t want to bother her.”

“She’s your mother. To say hello, you won’t be bothering her.”

“But I can come back once I do?” I couldn’t keep the whine out of my voice.

Mrs. Delavecchio mumbled something under her breath in Italian. Her dismissal hurt more than I thought it would have.

“That’s okay, Mrs. Delavecchio,” I said, trying to sound mature, trying to hide my feelings. “I understand you need some space right now and my mother needs to see me before she goes back to work. I wouldn’t want to ignore other people’s needs.”

The reply to this was some more Italian mumbling.

“Well, see you soon!” I said with forced cheer.

And so I returned involuntarily to my house. A brief stop. I’d be out of there within seconds and then off to do something with my day.

“Enid?” my mother inquired as I unlocked the door and let myself in.

“It’s not like anyone else has a key.”

“Maybe you should wait before coming into the dining room.”

“I have to say hello to you in person,” I shouted back as I stomped into the dining room. It was my house too. I should be allowed to go into whatever common area I felt like.

But then I could see why my mother had wanted me to stay out: she and Dr. Holden were drinking coffee at the table, and they weren’t drinking the homemade, caffeine-free, lukewarm paste my mother usually made for guests in an attempt to get them to leave. They were both sipping from waxed paper cups with cardboard sleeves you only get at nice coffee places. There wasn’t a nice coffee place in town. They would have had to drive a few towns over to get nice coffee. Dr. Holden would have had to have driven them a few towns over. They would have been in the car together.

“Good morning, Dr. Holden,” I said coldly. Then “Hello” to my mother. “Mrs. Delavecchio wanted me to check in with you.”

“Is that all?” my mother asked.

It didn’t have to be, but I refused to bring up my mother’s lies and defacement of my notebook in front of Dr. Holden. That was a private family issue. “Are you working today?” I muttered. After I showed this bare minimum of interest, I promised myself I could leave.

“I’m on the roster again tomorrow.” My mother answered with the same level of enthusiasm with which she’d been asked.

“I’m thinking that I should go,” Dr. Holden said, looking annoyed that my mother’s attention was no longer focused solely on him. It was an empty threat, since he neither stood nor took a long sip to finish his cup. But now I didn’t know how to leave without also including Dr. Holden in my departure.

The silence grew awkward.

“I’m not sure this is a suitable time,” Dr. Holden whispered to my mother, purposefully loud to make sure that I could hear.

“There’s never going to be a suitable time.” My mother’s voice sounded annoyed but not overtly angry. I was intimately familiar with that type of voice. “Enid,” she said, flattening her hands on the table. “You might be interested in knowing that Dr. Holden is your biological father.”