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“It was two dollars.”
“So it’s garbage you paid for.”
“Thank you, Rafe. Very helpful.”
She’s pissed. Actually pissed at a roll of tape. Her face is pink. Her ponytail is coming loose. She’s muttering at the tape gun under her breath, calling it words I didn’t know she knew.
The mark on her neck is gone. I look for it, and it’s gone. Her voice is her voice. She looks tired, but it’s the kind of tired everybody looks in December, when finals are a week out and nobody’s sleeping.
She’s mad at tape.
She holds a mailer down flat with her left hand while she tapes it with her right, and I see her finger. The bite’s mostly healed. Just a ring of pink marks now, faded, around the second knuckle.
“Your hand okay?” I ask.
She looks at it, like she forgot it was there.
“Fine.”
She tapes another one.
“Your throat?”
She stops taping.
She looks up at me. And I watch her figure out what I’m actually asking. It goes across her face.
“I’m okay, Rafe,” she says.
She doesn’t say it like I’ll be fine. She doesn’t say it like the driveway. She just says it, looking at me, flat and clear.
I nod.
Her phone buzzes on top of the pile.
I see the name on the screen before she does. Grandma.
She looks at it. She doesn’t pick it up. She turns it face down on the table with one finger and keeps sorting.
I don’t say anything.
She gathers up the gray pile and puts it back in her arms. Then the white pile on top. She looks at the tote.
“I have to get to the post office before it closes,” she says.
“It’s on Main.”
“I know where it is.”
“It’s a mile.”
“I know how far it is.” She hitches the tote up on her shoulder. “I’ve walked it every day for three weeks.”
I know. I’ve watched her dot do it. I don’t say that, either.
I have practice film in twenty minutes. I could offer to drive her. My keys are in my pocket.
I don’t.
