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first—prescription medicine for Ida Mendoza’s seizures and eyeglasses that Pie Richard had mailed off to be fixed more than a month past. Those seizures could make Ida fall down any time or place, and she got nervous when her medicine was low, started skipping pills. And Pie can’t tell whether she’s grabbing an egg or a chicken snake in the nest without her glasses. I set those two packages on the counter to remind me in case one of their neighbors came in. If no one came, I’d walk across the island before dark and deliver them myself. Just one more thing when you have a lot of people to watch out for. I picked up the first handful of letters and slid them into pigeonholes nailed to the wall behind the counter.
    Of course, everybody goes on about how neat the post office corner is compared to the store. Well, that’s the way my wife, Josie, set it up when she started sorting the mail right there in that corner after she finished third grade. Back then Josie’s pa, Elder Landry, was the postmaster, and Mame Landry ran the store. Josie wasn’t much more than a big kid when Elder died, but she took over the rest of the post office work as if he were still postmaster. She kept that corner neat as a pin until the night she died.
    None of us will likely forget that night when we lost half our family—not just my dear Josie but her brother, Lauf, and his wife, Beatrice, as well. Fate and Loyce were around six years old. Josie and I had lost two babies before Loyce was born and had hoped for more to come.
    Beatrice was supposed to have a few more weeks before her next baby came, but her labor started. There was nothing else to do but put Beatrice in the boat and set out across Lake Mongoulois in the dark. It would take twice as long to go over there and bring the midwife back. The last Mame and I saw of them, Lauf was standing up rowing, and Beatrice was sitting in the bottom. Josie was on the bow, holding a lantern, not so much to see but to be seen.
    As anyone can tell you, even on a dark night the glint of water can guide you between the banks. So, the danger is not what you might run over but that a big boat could run over you and never even know it. That’s what happened. No one heard them cry out, no paddle wheeler ever claimed to be the one that hit them. They just never made it across the lake.
    When they didn’t come back and we eventually faced up to what happened, Mame went daft. So, you might say I lost her too. She had been more than just a mother-in-law. My own mother signed up to be a census taker around the Chene while I was in college. During months of rowing around these bayous asking about other people’s families, Mama and her partner took a notion to get married themselves. They moved back to his home in New Iberia and later to Chicago when he inherited a family business there. Mame looked after me, along with Lauf and Josie. Of course, we were mostly grown by then.
    After the drownings I grieved for Mame just like I grieved for the dead ones. Her hair turned white overnight; if you don’t believe it, ask anyone who knew her back then. Later years, when she let it down, you could see the black part hanging almost to her knees. There was a sharp line where the black stopped and then white went all the way up, no gray at all. In summer the white part would turn pink, green, and blue as her bonnets faded from her sweat.
    Mame never was big, but after that she shrunk down to mostly bones, and she pretty much hid out under that bonnet. Tending the flowers and vegetable garden around the store was sort of her comfort. We all got used to seeing her crouched over the plants with her hatchet or butcher knife, chopping out the weeds. She looked like a bundle of rags that someone intended to put away but hadn’t decided where. Her back started to curve from all that squatting so that she eventually had to sew her clothes in two pieces—a top and a