“You heard your mother,” Doug said. He tried to make his voice sound tough, but he couldn’t help smiling. He pushed open the screen door and walked into the house, picking up the mail from the top of the table where he’d put it down.

He glanced at the envelopes in his hand.

Again there were no bills.

5

The next day Doug received a letter from Ford informing him that, due to the outcome of a lawsuit the company recently lost to a consumer-rights organization, the warranty on their Bronco’s power train had been extended for another year. There was also a two-dollar rebate check from Polaroid and a letter to Billy from Tritia’s mother, with a five-dollar bill in it.

The day after that, the mail consisted of a letter from Doug’s mother to Billy—the letter contained a one-dollar bill: she was richer than Tritia’s mother but cheaper—and a subscription to the Fruit-of-the-Month Club from an anonymous donor “on this, the occasion of your birthday.” The accompanying card was addressed to Tritia, but her birthday was not until January. Doug’s was closer, in October, but it was still several months away.

“Who could have sent us this, and why?” Tritia wondered, looking at the small box of red delicious apples.

Doug didn’t know, but he didn’t like it. He was also starting to worry about the bills. It had been exactly a week since Ronda had killed himself, and while he could not really find any fault with the man who had taken his place—John Smith—he did not think it natural that they had received no bills or junk mail in that time. There was something suspicious and unsettling about that. It was strange enough that it had happened once, but for the exact same thing to occur day after day… Well! Mail, by its very nature, was neither all good nor all bad. It carried indifferently messages both positive and negative, filtering nothing, making no distinctions. The odds against something like this occurring were probably astronomical.

Besides, he knew that both his water bill and Exxon bill came due at this time each month.

If he didn’t get those bills by Monday, he told Trish, he was going to go in and have a talk with Howard.

“Stop being so paranoid,” she said. “Jesus, if you’re bored, start cleaning up that trash in the back of the house. Start working on your storage shed. Do something useful. Stop thinking up bizarre conspiracy theories.”

“What bizarre theory?” he asked. “Some of our mail is obviously getting lost. I’m just going to talk to Howard about it.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ve had it in for that new mailman since the moment you laid eyes on him.”