All stories › Family Drama › The Letter Opener › Episode 1
The Hall Table
Episode 1 of 3 of The Letter Opener by Doug Ostrowski · free to read
The rubber band snapped before I had the mail off the hall table. Three weeks of it, banded by me every Tuesday, slid across the runner and onto the floor. Catalogs on the bottom, the church bulletin on top, and in between the things Irene actually wanted.
I knew what she wanted because she had called me at work that morning.
“Mark said you wanted it left on the table,” I said.
“Mark said. Lisa, I have been in this place three weeks and not seen a bill. I have a gas bill. I know I have a gas bill.”
“He told me you’d do it when you got home.”
“You bring it,” she said. “All of it. I’m not dead.”
“Anything I should open?”
“Nothing. If it’s a check, open it. And there’s a butter knife in the drawer by the phone. That’s the letter opener. Anybody puts it on butter, I’ll know.”
So I sorted her mail on the floor of her hallway, on my knees, in my work shoes. Catalogs in one pile for the recycling. Bulletins in another. Anything with a window in a third.
The third pile was thin for three weeks. Electric, gas, water. A property tax reminder. A card from her cousin with a cat on it. Then one thick envelope with a return address I did not know, a credit union, not the bank her checks came from.
I put it on the window pile and stood up.
The house was the same as every Tuesday. Sixty-two on the thermostat, because I had set it there, and Irene had texted that sixty-two was for the dead. The violets on the kitchen sill wanted water from the bottom. The fern wanted it from the top. The jade wanted to be left alone, and I had that in writing.
I ran the kitchen tap until it went from brown to clear. Then the bathroom sink. Then the tub, because her instructions had been specific about the tub.
“A house with nobody in it goes bad,” she had said at the hospital, two days after the back step, handing me her key. “Water, mail, heat. That’s a house.”
Mark was at the counter at a quarter past seven when I came in with the mail in a grocery bag.
“You brought it here,” he said.
“I’m taking it to her Thursday. She told me to.”
“She said leave it.”
“She says she didn’t.”
He looked at the bag and did not reach for it. He is a big man who has never once in twenty years looked small to me, and he looked at that bag the way he looks at an estimate he already knows will lose money.
“I need you to take next Tuesday,” I said. “I’ve got the quarter close.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s forty minutes. Three plants and the taps.”
“I can’t stand it empty, Lisa,” he said. “I’ve told you.”
“It’s a house.”
“Then you do it.”
“I am doing it,” I said. “I’ve done it three weeks running.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Your key,” I said. “If you’re not going, give me your key, and I’ll stop asking.”
He put his hand in his pocket and I thought that was the end of it. Instead he worked her key off his ring, which took a while, because his fingers are thick and the ring is old. He set it on the counter beside the bag.
“There,” he said. “Now nobody has to ask anybody.”
I put it on my ring next to hers. Two keys to one house, and he had neither.
I want to say plainly that I opened it. Not by accident, not because it was stuck to a catalog. I took the paring knife from the block at twenty to eleven and slit my mother-in-law’s mail at my own kitchen table while my husband slept upstairs.
It was a statement. Home equity loan, second lien, the address of the house I had just locked. Original principal, eighty thousand dollars. Loan date, April. Monthly payment, one thousand one hundred and forty dollars, due on the first.
Then the box at the bottom of the page. Past due, two payments. Please remit to avoid further action.
I read it twice, the way you read anything with your own address on it. It was not my address. I read it a third time, for the names.
Borrower: Irene M. Kowalczyk.
Co-borrower: Mark A. Kowalczyk.