CHAPTER TWO — A SECOND ABSENCE

I went to the post office that afternoon with the tracking number written on my hand.
Clerk Ramon Price searched the delivery record while a queue formed behind me.
“Carrier scanned it as delivered at ten forty-two,” he said.
“Could somebody else in your household have taken it?”
“I live alone.”
Ramon turned the screen toward me.
The photograph showed my envelope resting halfway inside my mailbox, with the blue corner clearly visible.
A second photograph, taken for a different parcel that afternoon, showed the box empty.
“Is that normal?” I asked.
“Photographs aren’t proof of who collected the mail,” Ramon answered.
“But you should file a report if you’re certain it is missing.”
I filled out the form at a counter beside the window.


A woman carrying a toddler waited behind me and complained about the slowness of the line.
I nearly abandoned the report because I felt foolish accusing an unknown person of taking one envelope.
Then Ramon mentioned two other items marked delivered to my address during the same week.
One was a notice from a regional arts foundation.
The other was a replacement reed order I had paid for on Wren’s behalf.
Neither had reached me.
I checked the dates and realized both had disappeared while I was teaching afternoon classes.
I walked home through cold November light, turning the facts over without wanting to arrange them.
At four, June called me across the fence.
She wanted to know whether I had resolved the problem with the orchestra.
“How did you know which orchestra?” I asked.


She went still.
“You mentioned it,” she said.
“I didn’t.”
“Maybe Wren mentioned it.”
Wren appeared in their kitchen window and stared at her mother.
June looked up sharply, and the girl vanished.
I asked June whether she had seen anyone near my mailbox.
“Children are always walking around,” she replied.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Did you see the delivery on Tuesday?”
“I wasn’t watching your house.”
She returned indoors before I could ask anything else.
That night, I searched my paperwork and discovered that the missing envelope was not the first problem.
A receipt for a metronome had never arrived.
Two invoices from a local repair shop were missing.
The parents of three students had written checks for accompaniment fees, but the envelopes had vanished between their homes and mine.
I phoned the parents and explained that I had not received their payments.
Each assured me they had sent them correctly.
One mother, Asha Patel, said something that made my stomach tighten.
“June told me you were donating your time this season,” she said.
“She said the checks were unnecessary.”
I sat on the kitchen floor and stared at the piano bench.
For weeks, June had been managing more than rehearsal schedules.
She had been deciding which facts other people were allowed to give me.