Chapter 14: Tuesday Again

Gerda would not let me have the letter back.

"Nothing leaves box 9 except into the hand it was written for," she said, on Saturday morning, with her arms crossed over her apron.

"I made a mistake."

"You made a letter."

"Gerda. Please."

"Fifty years," she said. "Not once. I'm not starting for a clerk with wet hair."

So I spent the weekend with my stomach in a knot.

Lennart was up at the north lease line with Karsten until Tuesday, walking boundary stones.

He did not come to the store, and I did not climb the ridge.

On Tuesday at six, the bell rang, and the room went quiet.

I did not look at the register.

I looked at the door, and I watched him walk through it.

He had three days of beard and mud on his boots, and he looked at me first, before the coffee, before the room.

"Evening, Maja."

"Evening, Alpha."

"I haven't opened my box since Friday."

I could not feel my hands.

"Why not?"

"I wanted to read it here."

He took the iron key from the cord at his neck and walked to the wall.

Forty brass doors, and he went to the ninth without looking at the numbers.

He took out one folded sheet, the only one in there, and shook it open standing under the hanging lamp.

The whole store watched him.

A man at the deli case stopped chewing.

Gerda, at the end of the counter, sliced a single piece of cheese very slowly and said nothing at all.

I rang up nothing and stared at the pencil cup.

It was only three lines, and he read them like a page.

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