Chapter 2: Return to Sender

Return to Sender

Five days before the lights went out, Hollis Ward picked up a letter at the post office and didn’t tell anybody about it.

The clerk made him sign for it — pen on a chain, acrylic shield, a line of strangers behind him learning all his business at forty-three years old. He signed. He carried the envelope out to the car under his arm like he’d stolen it.

He didn’t open it in the lot. He put it on the passenger seat and drove, and let three red lights go by without putting a hand on it, and he was still not touching it when his phone buzzed in the cupholder and QUIN lit up the screen.

One earbud. “Yeah.”

[Somebody came to my door today.]

“Debt collectors.”

[Not collectors.]

“Debt collectors, though.”

[He didn’t knock. He stood on the walk for twenty minutes and stared at the door like he was taking it apart in his head.]

Hollis switched lanes. “So what’d he want.”

[A thing.]

“You’re gonna have to do better than a thing.”

[He wants something from me. I opened the door and I told him no, and he didn’t leave.]

“He didn’t leave.”

[Still out there.]

“Okay.”

[He looked at my throat the whole time. Not my face.]

Hollis didn’t have anything for that one, so he let it sit.

He swung into his usual spot at the mouth of the alley, two doors down from the shop, killed the engine, and sat with both hands on the wheel while the earbud kept going.

He didn’t hear any of it. The envelope was in his lap already, and he didn’t remember picking it up.

Thumb under the flap. Tear along the top. One page, folded in three.

He read the first line.

Then he read it again, slower, the way you read a thing you’re hoping will fix itself on the second pass. It didn’t fix itself. Four words in, he had the shape of it, and the shape of it was bad.

[Hollis.]

He didn’t answer.

[You eating something? You’re breathing weird.]

He folded the page back along the seams, slid it into the envelope, put the envelope in the console under the registration, and shut the lid.

“Hey,” he said. His voice came out half a size too big. “So you’ve got a stalker.”

Silence on the line.

[What.]

“A stalker. That’s what that is. That’s the word for it.” He got a hand around the wheel, even though the car was off. “Guy finds your door, stands around out there twenty minutes, won’t take no for an answer. Stalker.”

[He’s not a stalker.]

“No?”

[He’s a kid.]

“A kid.”

[Kid with a plan.]

“Great.” Hollis laughed. He heard himself doing it — loud, a beat past the joke, the whole performance — and he couldn’t get it back down, so he kept going. “Let me guess. It’s a groupie. Years later, and they’re still finding the door.”

[Fuck off.]

“There it is.”

[Fuck off. Get churros.]

“I’m going,” he said, and got out of the car.

The smell had him before both feet were on the asphalt — sugar and hot oil and cinnamon, coming off a truck backed into the corner where the alley met the street. Window up, menu taped to the side in three colors of marker. A woman in scrubs already at the window with her card out.

An old man was going the same way, one leg dragging half a step behind the other. Hollis slowed up and let him have the sidewalk.

Then he saw who was working.

Black jacket, old, the leather gone pale and cracked across the shoulders. Gray cap pulled low enough to leave a shadow where a face should be. Dark hair knotted at the back of his neck, and a row of small silver studs going up one ear, catching the end of the day.

He wasn’t leaning. He wasn’t on his phone. He stood behind that truck like somebody had set him there and told him not to move, and he looked like the version of a person they put on the poster and never let you meet.

“Fuck me,” Hollis said, at normal volume, into the earbud. “They’re putting them behind fryers now.”

[Are you gonna order, or did the churros already run off with him.]

The old man got to the window and stood there with his mouth working. Nothing came out of it. His hands came up, though, and they were clumsy with whatever he was trying to say, and his face did the rest.

The kid watched him for a second. Then he put his hands out and signed back — quick and clean, both hands in it, no hesitation anywhere — and the old man’s shoulders dropped an inch and his hands straightened out, and the two of them had a whole conversation over the fryer without a sound.

Hollis stood there with his card out and his mouth open.

He watched it through. Money in, change out, a paper sleeve handed across with the top rolled down so the sugar wouldn’t go everywhere. The old man took it and went, and he walked better than he had coming in.

“Man,” Hollis said, loud, because there wasn’t any point keeping it down. “Deaf and gorgeous. What a waste.”

[Yeah, it’s a tragedy,] Quin said. [Order something.]

Hollis got to the window. He pointed at the fryer. Held up one finger. Then held the same finger up again, the wait-a-second version, and turned his head.

“Hey. Quin. You want one?”

He didn’t see the guy’s head come up.

“Fine,” Hollis said. “Don’t whine later.”

Then somebody came around the corner of the alley at a jog, a broad guy in a windbreaker already apologizing from twenty feet out.

“Thank you — seriously, thank you, you saved me.” He got behind the truck, still breathing hard, and knocked the cap off his own head. “You can’t leave this thing for two minutes on this block. I went to find a bathroom and there’s a line at the coffee shop like it’s a nightclub.”

Hollis was reading the menu, so he heard it before he saw it.

“Any time,” the kid said.

Low. Unhurried. Not loud, and it didn’t have to be.

Hollis turned his head.

He could talk. Which meant he could hear. Which meant that ninety seconds ago Hollis had announced to the entire corner that the guy behind the fryer was Deaf and gorgeous and a waste, at a volume he’d picked specifically because there wasn’t anybody around who could hear it.

He had never in his life been that embarrassed.

“Owner’s back,” he said, to nobody. “Buy from him.”

He walked away without a churro, at a pace that had nothing to do with anything.

Half a block on, Quin went quiet in his ear.

[Hey. The fat guy’s here again.]

Hollis stopped walking.

[Don’t come by the shop for a while.]

[Leave me a bite.]

The line went dead.

He stood on the sidewalk with the earbud still in and nothing in either hand. He turned around. Forty feet back, the line at the truck window was three deep, and the kid behind the fryer had his head up — one eye under the brim of that cap, pale and steady. Not on the owner. Not on the fryer.

On Hollis.

He got back in the car and sat with his hands on his knees.

The console was right there. He popped it anyway, and there was the registration, and the charger that had died in March, and the envelope, face up, exactly where he’d put it.

He left it there.

The return address said Merritt. Blue ink, small and level, in a hand he’d never seen before in his life.

And the first line of the letter, which he was not going to say out loud to anybody.

At the corner, the truck pulled somebody else in off the sidewalk. Hollis sat with his hand on the lid of the console a while longer.

He shut the lid.