Chapter 4: What the Street Knows

Reva Biggs put a plate of eggs in front of me before I had finished sitting down.

"Eat," she said. "Then talk. You've got the face you had in tenth grade when our English teacher read your essay aloud."

The Riverside diner had six booths, a counter, and a window that looked down Front Street to the flood wall.

Reva had owned it for four years.

She had stayed in Marietta when I left, and she had kept every one of my postcards in a drawer.

I told her about the shoebox.

She heard it with her red head bent over a coffee pot, and her hand stopped halfway through pouring.

"Verna," she said.

"All nine."

"Oh, that old..." She set the pot down hard.

"Odalys, I asked her once, years ago, at the Fourth of July picnic."

"I said, does she get his letters? And she said, honey, that boy writes to the whole street. I believed her."

She shook her head.

"It's not your fault," I said.

"I know it's not. I'm still going to be sorry for a week."

She slid into the booth across from me and wiped her hands on her apron.

"Do you know what they call it in this town?" she said.

"Alister McCreary and the Eckert mailbox. The high school kids dare each other to put a note in it on the third of October."

"He stayed at that mailbox, Odalys. Fourteen years, that man."

I put down my fork.

"He didn't stay there," I said. "He lives across the street."

"You know what I mean."

I did know.

I had been hearing it since the porch.

I had heard it in the way the new owner looked at me, and in the way Alister stood on my lawn.

Fourteen years of a man's letters, and no answer. A man who stayed.

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