A Postcard from the Person I Became

How it begins

The postcard was addressed in my handwriting, which was annoying because I had spent forty years teaching myself not to loop the lower-case g.

This one looped.

The picture showed a harbor I had never visited.

On the back, beneath the stamp, someone had written: You would hate the stairs, but you would love the kitchen.

It was signed Marta.

I put it in the undeliverable tray.

By lunch, there were three more.

One came from a city where I apparently owned a bookshop. One from a farmhouse with a leaking roof. The third showed a red bicycle beside a house I recognized immediately.

My mother's house.

No signature.

I checked the postmarks.

All ordinary.

All dated yesterday.

Yusuf found me standing beside the sorting table with the bicycle card in my hand.

"Bad news?"

"I don't know."

He had known me before I became a person who could deliver difficult letters without looking at the windows.

He took the card only when I offered it.

"Your mother kept that bicycle."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I put the card in my coat.

The route was long that afternoon. At every house, a version of somebody waited: the woman who stayed, the man who left, the couple who had begun again and still argued about the bins.

By the final village, I had read the bookshop card six times.

It mentioned a beautiful reading room.

It also mentioned a daughter who no longer called.

At home, my mother's last letter sat unopened beneath the telephone.

Thirty years is a long time to be too busy for an envelope.

I put the unsigned postcard beside it.

In the photograph, the bicycle leaned toward the open gate.

I could almost remember the sound its wheel made when somebody was coming down the lane.

That evening, for the first time, I looked up the bus timetable instead of another possible life.