WHAT WILL HAPPEN
They stand on the porch waiting. Glen watches the mailman move from one house to the next. His mail truck is parked in the street and inside are bins holding canvas bags full of mail. He just carries his work around in a truck all day until the work is gone, Glen thinks. He has a calm feeling in his arms. He thinks about the canvas bags being emptied. He wants to put all of his work into the back of his truck and drive around until it is gone. He wants this to be his job, he thinks. It starts to feel like a secret which house the mailman is in. Sherry stands and points her fingers at spots in the lawn that look patchy. She focuses her eyes so that her fingertips cover the patches. She touches Glen on the shoulder to ask what time it is and feels unsure if it is actually the mail they have been waiting for.
Inside it’s just a stack on the table that they pretend to ignore. The stack is mostly letters selling deals they could get on phone service or cable. It’s also catalogs that Sherry reads at night. She flips through papery pages with a cup of coffee and thinks about the noises coming from the TV. There are two catalogs and the other is sitting on the coffee table. What will happen when she’s through with them? she thinks. The noises are commercials Glen is watching in the bedroom. She’ll cut a melon for them to eat at breakfast, she thinks. Or she’ll have another cup of coffee but with nothing to look at will instead bother Glen into a fight.
They trade the bathroom in the morning. Glen feels heavy sitting at the table. Sherry drops her hands onto surfaces until things are straight. They ignore the car radio playing loudly next door because they know it’s men re-tiling a roof; they both have seen the careful red stacks in the driveway and the miraculous way the men drop each old tile down a long, makeshift plank, just to keep it from breaking.