I recognized the moment. I was supposed to respond in agreement, a roll of the eyes or a nod that said I also didn’t understand the mysteries of men. No problem. I didn’t.
“Is there somewhere I can take a look at this?” I said. “I shouldn’t be long.”
Sherry slid the envelope across the counter and watched my hand claim it. “Back there,” she said. “Any of the desks that aren’t . . . gross. They’re all slobs.”
I chose a desk near the sheriff’s dark door. That man, Sherry had said, as though this one was worth distinguishing from another. I don’t think I’d ever offered a wry smile over a man’s endearing faults. I hadn’t had much of a chance for fondness.
Just before I’d started formal training in handwriting, I’d moved into another new—old, actually—apartment, a house with three floors and tall ceilings. Kentucky. I was hugely pregnant and slow on the stairs, which attracted the attentions of the man on the top floor. He always managed to be getting his mail at the same time I was coming home. When he finally asked me to dinner, I couldn’t imagine what he saw in me. I wasn’t finding men at all attractive, then. But I’d considered his offer.
In my lonely life, even with another life growing inside me, those months were the most alone I’d ever been. I waited tables, and sometimes the other girls would cover me for an extra break out of pity, but we weren’t friends. I took reduced-price classes at the community center, taught by retired accountants and résumé-building new college graduates, any topic anyone wanted to teach me. I hardly talked to anyone. I didn’t know what I was doing during that time. I spun in place with energy, with freedom and possibility, but also with nerves jangling. Each evening was a struggle not to dial Ray’s number and tell him where to pick me up. I missed him. I missed—everything. My memories would flatten until I couldn’t remember why I was somewhere he wasn’t.
Then, in one of the community center classes, I learned a bit about handwriting analysis from a librarian who had taken it up as a hobby.
The world peeled away. My manager at the restaurant had a scribble as fast as a rabbit’s heartbeat, panicked. The college student taking polls at the bus stop transcribed with a script so tight and hesitant that she seemed to grow smaller as she wrote. People began to reveal themselves on the page. In life, they might be working, playing with their kids, remodeling their houses. But on the page, most of them skirted the edges of complete chaos.
Once I’d scraped the bottom of the librarian’s knowledge of handwriting analysis, I’d put together enough tips from the restaurant to order a used textbook. The package came while I was at work, and the nice upstairs neighbor signed for it, leaving it at my door with a note. He hadn’t known he was giving me everything I needed.
His handwriting had been calming, elegant in a way I hadn’t expected and hadn’t ever seen. I put myself to sleep that night remembering the way his script rolled forward, confident and steady and hopeful.
But then every time I saw him afterward, he brought up the package and how happy he’d been to offer his John Henry for the delivery. He meant John Hancock. John Henry, the steel-driving man, had probably signed his name, if he ever had, with a shaky X. Was John Henry a real person? John Hancock was the one with the significant signature. Maybe it was a joke? I couldn’t tell.
The neighbor only smiled, now with affection. What I saw was possession. He didn’t know me, didn’t know what I’d come through to hold this precious freedom in my own two hands. But he was already breaking off a hunk of it for himself.
I started to use the back stairwell. After Joshua was born, his late-night cries drove off most of the other neighbors, including the man with the elegant hand.
That man might have been something to regret, if I was in the mood. But these days I only had time for the man I was trying to raise.
I was still holding the sheriff’s assignment in my hand. I ran a finger under the envelope’s sealed flap and slid out a single sheet of copy paper and a plastic sleeve. I shook the package upside down. Another, smaller piece of paper drifted to the desk.
I took up this one first. Pink, lined. It had been ripped without care from a notepad, probably beside the phone. Two edges of the paper were ragged. Felt-tip pen, black.
Content first:
MILK, CAT FOOD
AIDAN’S CRACKERS
PEANUT BUTTER
BANANAS
HAMBERGER
I went through the list again, then turned the paper over, looking at the points at which the pen had leaked through. I turned to the front again and studied each line. The lettering was all uppercase, rigid, each letter a hostage on the page. Each word had taken a lot of time. The author might have used a chisel and had similar results—except that Aidan’s crackers had a little slant to it.
I looked for a long time at those two words, so heavy with attention and care. So laden with the unbearable love for the name a mother called her child.
Then I turned to the other sheet of paper. It was a copy. A color copy, but still a copy. Apparently Keller considered my time his to waste.
Like the grocery list, the note had been ripped from a larger piece of paper, ragged on two edges, too, from the looks of the thing. Pink again. Hearts in a slight darker pink lined the edges. It was unsigned, and the block letters of the grocery list were gone. The script here was slim and girlish, but uneven and hurried. Ballpoint pen, blue.
that I want Aidan with me. You figure out how to get money to us after. We’ll go away
I smoothed the paper under my hand, though it was perfectly flat. I kept reading the content over and over—though I hadn’t been hired for content, had I? I was stuck here, hoping that the sentence would finish, that something would link up and make sense.
After a few seconds, I sat back.
“Tough case?” Sherry called from across the room. She sat forward in her chair, making me think of her open, overly giving handwriting, her Back in a jiff! Those round letters, the ending flourishes of those ffs, like an arm curled, beckoning.
I glanced back at the grocery list. “Pretty tough,” I said.
She lit up and hurried to my side, looking down at the two samples for a moment. “I don’t know how you can tell anything from that,” she said. “Especially that one. Block letters all look the same, don’t they?”
We stared at the pages. “Do you know the little boy’s family?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, doesn’t everyone know everyone else around here?”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re—well.” She could have said new to town, but she hadn’t.
“Tell me about the father,” I said.
Sherry’s eyes drifted back toward the note and list. “I thought it was the mother who wrote these.”