The first that Riley saw of the letter was a picture of it in an email from the post office, the morning of the day it arrived. Riley had signed up for the notification service a few years earlier, when packages were being stolen out of the lobby of the building where he and his husband lived. The thief was eventually caught, but Riley never unsubscribed. He found that he liked having a little foreshadowing of the day, at least in the case of something as innocent as the day’s mail.
The picture appeared beneath the picture of a seed catalogue, also to be delivered that afternoon. (It was going to be spring soon.) The letter seemed to be in a no. 10 envelope, and the image made an impression on Riley because his name and address were handwritten, in handwriting that belonged to someone he knew, he was pretty sure, but couldn’t immediately place. Riley hadn’t lived at the address since before law school, but someone with different handwriting had crossed it out and written in the address of Davenport & Elkins, the firm he had worked for right out of law school, and a third person had crossed that out—Riley had left the firm six years ago, to start his own practice—and written Riley and Craig’s current home address. Someone in the mail room at Davenport & Elkins remembered him, evidently. No return address was visible.
It was impressive how much sentimental authority a handwritten letter still commanded, in terms of effort that strangers were willing to put into helping to forward it.
Riley tried for a few minutes to summon the name or even an image of the person whose handwriting he thought it was. Before he dismissed the puzzle as one that would solve itself later in the day, a trace thought passed through his mind, a fragment that wouldn’t quite resolve into an identification: it was someone who, although he was older than Riley chronologically, didn’t realize how young he was as a person.
Over the course of the day, Riley forgot about the letter so completely that he didn’t even check the mailbox when he came home that night, and it was Craig who handed it to him, when Craig came in the door half an hour after he did.
The envelope was flimsier than it had looked in the JPEG. Maybe it was empty? It did have a return address, actually. On the back. An address on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, somewhere in Midtown. Maybe lower.
“Is it one of those pamphlets?” Craig wondered.
Sometimes they got pamphlets about hell from believers. Either the believers noticed that two men with different last names were sharing an address or they sent their pamphlets out indiscriminately.
“I don’t—” Riley recognized the return address only in the partial way he had recognized the handwriting, with a half-revealed feeling. It was somewhat frustrating—that was as much as he remembered about the building at first. The building was frustrating.
