Why do we spend half our lives waiting for someone to drop dead before we finally look them in the eye? That is the question I kept asking myself while I stood by my screen door with a $41.80 box of dishwasher detergent in my hands and a stack of twenty-two little yellow paper squares sitting in the junk drawer by the toaster. Gaffney in August is like breathing through a hot wool blanket. The humidity sits on the brick houses until the mortar looks like it is sweating. I was fifty-one years old, divorced twice, working forty hours a week at the county tax office, and I did not have time for games or cute little messages written by twenty-year-old kids who probably couldn’t tell a parcel post from a certified legal brief. Or so I told myself every single afternoon when I heard the heavy thud of rubber soles on my concrete steps.<\/p>\n
The notes started coming back in May. The first one was stuck to a padded envelope containing a replacement screen for my tablet. “Keep going,” it said in that shaky, heavy-handed block lettering that looks like somebody writing with their non-dominant hand. I peeled it off and dropped it straight into the recycling bin with the cereal boxes. Two days later, another box arrived. A three-pack of ink cartridges. Another yellow square. “You matter today.” I tossed that one too. By July, they were coming twice a week. Sometimes it was just a smiley face with an arrow pointing toward my house number. Sometimes it was a single word like “Breathe.” I figured it was some corporate customer service stunt. Some new training program out of the regional distribution center in Spartanburg designed to boost ratings or whatever nonsense they teach kids these days.<\/p>\n
Then came the Tuesday when the heat index hit 104 degrees and my kitchen sink backed up with three days of gray dishwater. I was on my knees with a pair of rusty channel-locks trying to clear the P-trap under the cabinet when the front porch boards creaked. The delivery truck door slammed shut with that loose, rattling metal sound I had heard six hundred times before. I didn’t get up. I just sat back on my heels, wiped my greasy forearm across my forehead, and waited for the customary two knocks. The thud never came. Instead, the screen door swung open a couple of inches, and a cardboard box scraped against the floorboards right inside the entryway.<\/p>\n
I scrambled up, banging my shoulder against the cabinet door. “Hey!” I yelled, wiping my hands on my jeans. “You can’t just leave them inside the screen like that. The stray cats get in here.”<\/p>\n
The delivery driver had already turned around, but he stopped on the second step. He wasn’t some nineteen-year-old kid with earbuds in his ears. He was maybe mid-forties, wearing a faded brown uniform shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, showing forearms tanned dark as walnut wood and corded with lean muscle. He had short, iron-gray hair that was plastered to his skull with sweat and a deep, vertical scar running from his left temple down past the corner of his jaw. He looked back over his shoulder, and his eyes were the color of muddy river water.<\/p>\n
“Sorry, Ms. Miller,” he said. His voice was gravelly, like he had been swallowing dust all morning. “Didn’t mean to scare you. The latch on your screen was hanging loose. Didn’t want the box sliding down the steps if a truck went by too fast.”<\/p>\n
I stood there with my wrench still dangling from my right hand. “How do you know my name?” I asked.<\/p>\n
He didn’t smile, but the lines around his eyes softened just a fraction. “I deliver to this route four days a week. You’ve lived in number 412 for twelve years. My name is Wayne.”<\/p>\n
“Wayne,” I repeated, tasting the word like it was something foreign. I looked down at the box on the floor. Stuck right across the shipping label was the yellow square. “You’re the one leaving these.”<\/p>\n
Wayne looked at the yellow paper and then back up at me. He didn’t look away or try to make some smart joke to cover it up. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I am.”<\/p>\n
“Why?” I snapped. The word came out sharper than I intended, but my back was aching from the plumbing and the kitchen smelled like rotten grease. “Is this some kind of route requirement? Do you people get a bonus for being folksy?”<\/p>\n
Wayne let out a short, dry breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there wasn’t any humor in it. “No bonus, Ms. Miller. The company doesn’t know anything about them. My supervisor thinks I’m just slow because I take an extra ten seconds at every third stop.”<\/p>\n
“Then why do it?” I demanded, taking a step toward the screen door. “People don’t just go around sticking post-it notes on strangers’ packages for nothing. What are you selling?”<\/p>\n
Wayne shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck with a large, calloused hand. “I’m not selling anything. I just figured you looked like you could use a reminder that somebody noticed you were still here.”<\/p>\n
That was the moment the room should have gone quiet, but it didn’t. Instead, I heard the faint rattle of the neighbor’s lawnmower two streets over and the compressor on my own refrigerator kicking on with a loud, metallic shudder. I stared at him through the rusted wire mesh of the screen. I wanted to tell him to keep his little notes to himself. I wanted to tell him that I had managed fifty-one years without needing motivational speeches written on office supplies from the Dollar General. But I looked at his hands, and I noticed the way his right pinky finger was crooked at an odd, healed-over angle, like it had been broken and set wrong a long time ago.<\/p>\n
“I don’t need a reminder,” I lied. My voice dropped down to a whisper that felt thin and ragged in the hot hallway.<\/p>\n
“Everybody needs one,” Wayne said simply. “Some days you just need it louder than others.”<\/p>\n
He turned around then, descended the remaining two steps, and walked back to his brown step-van without another word. I watched him climb into the cab, the old diesel engine coughing twice before catching with a heavy roar that shook the glass in my front windows. He pulled away from the curb, his brake lights flashing red against the asphalt as he made the turn toward Cherry Street. I stood by the door for a long time, the wrench growing heavy in my palm, until the sound of the truck faded completely into the hum of the afternoon cicadas.<\/p>\n
I didn’t go back to the sink right away. I walked over to the entryway, picked up the box Wayne had left, and peeled the yellow square off the plastic wrapping. I carried it into the kitchen, pulled open the junk drawer, and stared down at the stack of twenty-two identical notes I had thrown away over the summer. I didn’t throw this one away. I laid it right on top of the toaster where I would have to look at it every time I waited for my English muffin to pop up.<\/p>\n
Two days later, Thursday morning, I waited by the window. I didn’t have any packages scheduled for delivery, but I kept my kitchen window cracked three inches just so I would hear the specific squeak of that van’s front suspension. When the brown truck pulled up to the curb at 11:14 AM, I was already standing on the top step before Wayne had even killed the ignition.<\/p>\n
He climbed out of the cab carrying a small padded mailer for Mrs. Gable across the street, but he stopped halfway up my walk when he saw me standing there in the glaring sun with my arms crossed over my chest. He looked surprised for a second, his eyebrows pulling together in a sharp line, then he let out a slow breath.<\/p>\n
“You don’t have a package today, Ms. Miller,” he said, holding the mailer against his chest like a shield.<\/p>\n
“I know,” I said. I walked down the two steps until I was standing right on the concrete path a few feet from him. The heat radiating off the sidewalk was like standing in front of an open oven door. “I wanted to ask you something.”<\/p>\n
Wayne stopped. He shifted his weight, his eyes darting toward Mrs. Gable’s porch before coming back to rest on my face. “Shoot,” he said.<\/p>\n
“My name is June,” I told him, and for some reason my voice shook on the second syllable. “Not Ms. Miller. You’ve been calling me Ms. Miller for five years. My name is June.”<\/p>\n
A slow, tired smile touched the corners of his mouth, though his eyes stayed heavy. “June,” he said, testing the word like he was trying to figure out if it fit. “Okay. June.”<\/p>\n
“Why did you start writing those notes, Wayne?” I asked. I didn’t keep the edge out of my voice. I wanted to know. I needed to know why some stranger in a delivery uniform was spending his own dime and his own time reminding a grumpy woman in Gaffney that she was still breathing. “Was it a bad divorce? Did you lose somebody?”<\/p>\n
Wayne looked down at the concrete between us. He stood there for a long time, watching a line of black ants crawl across a crack in the pavement. When he finally looked back up, the scar on his jaw seemed to tighten.<\/p>\n
“Five years ago,” he said, his voice dropping so low I had to lean forward to catch the words over the hum of traffic on the highway three blocks over, “they told me I had six months. Stage four. Tongue and throat.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t say anything. My mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out.<\/p>\n
“They operated down at the medical center in Charleston,” Wayne continued, his thumb tracing the edge of the padded mailer. “Took half my tongue, cleared out the lymph nodes on the left side. Said the odds were about twenty percent I’d be talking normally again, let alone swallowing solid food. I sat in that hospital room for three weeks looking at the wall, waiting to die. My wife left three days after the stitches came out. Said she couldn’t look at me anymore.”<\/p>\n
He paused, swallowing hard. I could see the muscles in his throat working against the scar tissue.<\/p>\n
“And then one morning,” he said, looking straight into my eyes, “the young girl who brought the breakfast tray left a little paper napkin under my water pitcher. She’d drawn a smiley face with a pen. It was stupid. It didn’t change my lab results. It didn’t give me my wife back. But it made me realize I was still sitting in a room where people were trying to reach me.”<\/p>\n
He took a step closer, the smell of hot canvas and motor oil washing over me.<\/p>\n
“The doctors were wrong about the six months,” Wayne said softly. “I’m still here. But every morning when I wake up, I remember what it felt like to stare at that wall and think nobody knew I was breathing. So I buy these yellow pads at the dollar store. I write fifty of them every Sunday night while watching the race. I stick them on packages for people who look like they might need to be reminded that they’re still in the room.”<\/p>\n
I stood there on the hot concrete, and for the first time in five years, the Gaffney humidity didn’t feel like it was choking me. My chest felt hollowed out, clean and open like an empty church after everyone has gone home.<\/p>\n
“You’re an idiot, Wayne,” I whispered, and my voice cracked right down the middle.<\/p>\n
Wayne let out a real laugh then, deep and gravelly, shaking his head as he stepped past me toward Mrs. Gable’s porch. “I’ve been called worse by experts, June,” he said over his shoulder.<\/p>\n
He delivered Mrs. Gable’s mailer, turned around, and walked back down my steps without leaving a note. He didn’t need to. As he climbed back into his truck and put it in gear, I reached down, pulled the front screen door open, and waited for him to pull away. He gave a single, sharp blast of the horn as he turned the corner onto Elm Street, the brown van disappearing into the afternoon glare. I walked back inside, picked up the yellow note from the toaster, and put it in my pocket where I could feel the sharp corners against my thumb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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