The previous owner of my house was a prison guard.
“That’s why you didn’t have a mailbox when you first moved in,” Judy said. “Rex didn’t want the prisoners to find out where he lived.”
But couldn’t they just look him up in the phone book? I thought. The street address was still on the house. Three big brass numbers nailed into the door frame. Surely, if a prisoner wanted to find his house, burn it down and piss on the ashes, sodomize and bludgeon and cannibalize his wife and children, toilet paper his yard, a simple PO Box couldn’t stop a sincere investigation.
But I didn’t say that to her.
“That makes sense,” I said, leaning on my shovel.
“Well, I better let you get back to the driveway,” Judy said.
Maybe I had come off as sarcastic.
“You know, Rex shoveled that driveway ‘til he was 90 years old,” she said, flicking her cigarette into a snow drift, its barely audible hiss timed perfectly with the slight burn of shame I felt in my face.
She had probably seen KT shoveling the other day, or Ben, another neighbor, almost twice my age, pushing his snow-blower through my sidewalk.
“Isn’t that something,” I said, and finished the driveway in silence. |
