The Box

The Habit

Chapter 13: The Box

The envelope was in the mailbox on Monday.

Padded. Manilla. His name written in block letters that were deliberate without being stiff. NOEL WARE, then his street address, then Knoxville, Tennessee, as if Renee distrusted abbreviations where important things were concerned.

He carried it inside and set it on the table. Then he made coffee he did not want and drank half of it standing up before opening the envelope, which was his version of ceremony when he did not trust himself with the word.

Inside was a note and four items.

The note was first.

Noel,
These are the things with your name or face on them. I kept the originals except the picture because I thought maybe you should have that one. No rush to say anything back. Renee.

The picture was wallet-sized. School portrait. Noel at maybe eight or nine, in a plaid shirt Ruth had bought one size too large because children are expensive when they insist on growing. His ears stuck out more than he remembered. The cowlick above his left eyebrow was making its usual argument with the comb. The background was the kind of mottled blue all school portraits in the late eighties seemed to share, as if public education had once agreed on a single abstract sky.

He held the photograph between thumb and forefinger and tried to remember the day it had been taken.

Nothing came.

The second item was a photocopy of an address-book page. Names written in alphabetical columns. Most of them unreadable. The only line that mattered was under N: Noel - Knoxville - 8/14. No phone number. Just the city and the birthday. As if the existence of a son could be reduced, for storage purposes, to a place and a date.

The third item was a utility bill from 1996, the Knoxville address circled in blue ink. His name was not on the bill, only Ruth's, but on the back Elton had written Ruth Ware / Noel in the top right corner, small enough that it looked like a notation to himself rather than a declaration to anyone else.

The fourth item was a church bulletin from Mt. Olive Baptist. Not from 2004, as Renee had guessed. From 1999. Homecoming Sunday. The paper had been folded into quarters so long the creases had darkened. On the back, in the empty white space under the printed announcements, Elton had written only two words:

Drove by.

No date beyond the bulletin's own. No explanation.

Noel put the bulletin down and sat back in the chair.

He knew exactly what that meant. Not factually. Factually it meant a man had been in Knoxville on a Sunday in 1999 and had driven past a church where his former wife and son might have been. Emotionally it meant something worse: proximity without action. Nearness that chose not to become presence.

He picked the photograph back up.

Children in school portraits do not know what the adults around them are about to do. This was not a revelation. It was simply visible in the picture. The boy in the plaid shirt looked as if the future belonged to sequence. Picture day, then lunch, then math, then home. The idea that a father could exit the structure and keep existing somewhere else was not on his face because children do not, as a rule, pose for catastrophe in advance.

At work that afternoon Darren asked if Noel was coming to lunch.

"Brought mine," Noel said.

"You ate yours at ten-thirty."

Noel looked up. Darren pointed at the empty yogurt container in the trash.

"All right," Darren said. "You don't have to tell me what's going on, but whatever it is, your body is handling it like a raccoon handles a highway."

Noel almost laughed. Not because it was especially funny. Because Darren had the rare gift of making concern arrive dressed as nuisance, which was the only clothing Noel ever let it wear in his direction.

"Memphis called back," he said.

Darren's face changed by increments. Surprise. Interest. Then, commendably, restraint.

"That sounds like a whole thing."

"It is."

"You want lunch anyway?"

Noel considered. The address-book page. The bulletin. Drove by.

"Yeah," he said. "All right."

They went to a sandwich place on Magnolia. Darren talked almost entirely about permitting backlog and a dispute over a detached garage, which Noel recognized for the gift it was.

That night he wrote:

Found the envelope from Memphis in the mailbox. There was a school picture of me in a plaid shirt and one page from his address book with my birthday on it. I still cannot decide whether keeping a thing counts as care or just evidence.

He read the sentence twice.

The answer did not arrive.