Tiny Little Fractures

Chapter Ten

I thought about the card the entire drive to work that morning. By the time I got there I was convinced it was a cruel prank. Of course I wanted it to be real, but I didn’t want to believe it just to get heartbroken all over again. I wasn’t sure if I could do it again. I could feel the fractures crumbling already.

My best friend Stephanie was planning her own wedding. For the most part, she never brought it up. As if she was afraid the mere mention of marriage would make me fall apart at the seams. As if I was under the impression that none of my friends would ever get married. I was supposed to be her maid-of-honor, but she was doing all the planning with her mother instead of me.

Thoughts of her wedding didn’t bring up memories of Jon, but as I said before, everything did. I just chose not to talk about them out loud. An outsider might think I’d moved on or made peace with my loss. But the girl who’d known me just as long as I’d known Jon could tell just the opposite was true. I had always been quiet, and relatively sensitive. But now I had just become quiet, withdrawn, and seemingly emotionless. Either way, the thought of her wedding DID occasionally remind me of my own wedding, but not enough to break me down.

When we were planning our wedding, Stephanie bought us a bunch of bridal magazines. I read in one of them that you could send the invitations out through a different zip code. All you had to do was mail the invitations in a box addressed to the postmaster and ask them to send the invites out for you. Then they would be dispersed from there so the stamp could have a cool name like Beaver Lick or Kissimmee. It was supposed to be cute and/or funny to have it from a town with a strange or romantic name. We’d settled on Kissimmee before deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle just so the invites could have a stupid stamp in the corner.

We never told anyone about that. Not that we considered it or actually had all the invites boxed up and ready to be shipped to Kissimmee. The invites ended up going out locally. No one would have even known the difference. That’s why we chose not to go through with it. No one would have glanced at the Kissimmee stamp anyway. It was the first thing I noticed. It was my natural instinct to check the postmark when there was no return address. He’d know that I remembered Kissimmee. The postmark didn’t necessarily mean it was from Florida. It just meant it had been there before reaching me. It could have come from anywhere before then.

I waited until my free lunch period to lock myself up inside my classroom and make a phone call. I dialed 411 to get the number for the post office with the right zip code. Then I asked the woman on the phone if they’d received a letter addressed to the postmaster, asking to have it sent from their zip. She said it happened all the time. People thought it was romantic. She never saved the original envelopes. She didn’t remember where the last one had come from. All she knew for sure that the last card she’d gotten was sent via regular post and she sent it out immediately. It had to have been at least two weeks ago.

That meant that whoever sent the card had mailed the envelope possibly two weeks before our anniversary. It was deliberate. It had to be Jon. So as of two weeks ago—Jon was alive.