The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

bed.
    “Okay,” he exhaled, pushing a faint wisp of worry away.
    “Oh.” She pushed herself off the bed, needing to walk at the start of another contraction. Will helped her onto her feet and waited through the next one with her, all the time watching how she breathed. When it had eased, she focused back on him. “How far along am I?”
    “Six centimeters or so. You’ve got a ways to go still. But you’re doing swell.”
    She smiled weakly, rising to sit on the side of the bed, holding her hand out to Will. He pulled her to her feet and they started walking again, first to the opposite side of the room, then back.

    THE GULLS ROSE up suddenly off the pylons on the pier, the swift beating of their wings like hands shuffling cards, and Iris followed them as they wheeled into the sky outside the window. She crossed the wooden floor of the lobby, unlocked the front doors, and the blast of a northerly wind hit her. Quick as she could, she reached out and uncleated the line on the flagpole and the flag came sliding on its tether down the pole into her hands.
    “Evening,” a voice said from below.
    She jumped and clutched the cloth to her chest as though he had caught her at something secret. “Oh, hello,” she called over her shoulder, shivering. She should have put on her coat, she realized.
    “Want help with that?”
    She shook her head, releasing the flag from the metal clips on the line, and turned around. Harry Vale had one foot up on the bottom stair and one hand loosely on the railing. He smiled and she smiled back, embarrassed to be standing above him this way. It had the effect of making him appear very small.
    “I’ve been using your mug.” She let her eyes down to look at his hand on the railing, the flag still crumbled into a ball in her arms.
    “Good.” He nodded. But his attention drifted to the pole above her head. “Just the top three feet,” he nudged, smiling. “Would you give me the top three feet? Just to get it below the roofline.”
    She cleated the line and rested her hand on the painted wood, not quite sure what she wanted to say. It had become something like a joke between them, a running patter, though it wasn’t a joke and she knew it. “I haven’t heard from the post office inspector,” she said.
    He lowered his gaze to her face. “It doesn’t worry you?”
    She flushed. “We can’t allow ourselves to take things into our own hands like that.”
    “Why not?” He slid his hand along the ridge of the gate.
    With a small, efficient stab, the question pricked her. They were at odds, she realized, unhappily.
    “Never mind,” he said gently. “Good night.”
    “Good night,” she answered and he ambled off. That hadn’t gone at all the way she wanted.
    She crossed the lobby with the flag in her arms and pushed through the door into the back part of the post office, shutting it firmly behind her. One couldn’t behave as though the post office was just another building, its flagpole just another piece of wood. It represented something. Order. And here at the very heart of the system, she let out her breath, carefully. Back here the open mailboxes stretched floor to ceiling, ready for her to fill. The broad wooden sorting table was cleared for the morning’s mail. If there was a place on earth in which God walked, it was the workroom of any post office in the United States of America. Here was the thick chaos of humanity rendered into order. Here was a box for each and every family in the town. Letters, bills, newspapers, catalogs, packages might be sent forth from anywhere in the world, shipped and steamed across water and land, withstanding winds and time, to journey ever forward toward this single, small, and well-marked destination. Here was no Babel. Here, the tangled lines of people’s lives unknotted, and the separate tones of voices set down upon a page were let to breach the distance. Hand over hand the thoughts were passed. And hers was the hand at the end.
    Still.