The convenience store on Route 9 was open from six in the morning until midnight, which meant that for eighteen hours a day, Ray Kowalski was awake and for six hours a day, he was awake in the dark in his apartment above the laundromat and couldn't sleep and lay there listening to the pipes in the walls make sounds like someone was walking in the ceiling.

It was a Tuesday in October. The store was quiet. There was a woman at the counter buying lottery tickets and a man in a trucker hat buying cigarettes and a kid on a skateboard who came in every day at the same time and bought a soda and didn't buy anything else. Ray rang up the transactions in the order they came. He didn't talk to the customers. The customers didn't talk to him. This was fine.

At 2:17 PM, the door opened and Frank Kowalski walked in.

Ray was restocking the candy bars behind the counter when he heard the door. He knew it was Frank before he looked up because Frank walked differently than other people—he walked with the heavy, uneven gait of a man who carried something inside him that he couldn't put down. Not a weight exactly. More like a shape. A shape that didn't fit.

Ray looked up. Frank was standing in the aisle next to the milk, holding a carton without really looking at it. He was wearing the same jacket he had worn the last time Ray saw him, six months ago, at the grocery store. The jacket was gray and it was too thin for October.

"Ray," Frank said.

Ray put down the candy bar he was holding. "Frank."

They stood in the aisle next to the milk and didn't say anything for a while. The woman with the lottery tickets paid and left. The trucker paid and left. The kid on the skateboard came in, bought a soda, and left. The bell above the door rang three times and then was quiet again.

"I heard you got a cat," Frank said.

"I got a cat."

"What kind?"

"Mix. Black and white. He's old."

"Old is good. Old cats know things."

Ray nodded. He didn't know what else to say. There was a lot he wanted to say. There was a lot he needed to say. But the words were stuck somewhere in his chest, behind his ribs, where they had been stuck for ten years, ever since the day he found the box of letters in his father's garage and opened it and read the first one and understood that the story he had been told—about his father leaving, about his father moving away, about his father not wanting to be part of their lives—was not the story that had actually happened.

The real story was in the letters. Frank's letters. Letters that Frank had written to Stanley ten years ago and never sent. Letters that contained apologies and accusations and explanations and excuses and things that Frank had never said to Stanley's face. Letters that showed a man who was not evil and not good but just a man who had made bad choices and was too afraid to admit it.

Ray had read the letters once and then put them back in the box and then taken the box to his apartment and put it under his bed and then taken it out every night for a week and read them again and then put them back and then taken them out again.

He had not shown them to anyone. Not Hank, who used to work at the factory with him before it closed. Not Officer Miller, who sat in his office at the police station and drank coffee and read the newspaper and didn't ask questions. Not anyone.

Because what would you do with letters like that? You could show them to someone and they could read them and they could have an opinion and they could tell you what to do, and Ray didn't want anyone to tell him what to do. He wanted to figure it out himself.

"I'm getting the milk," Frank said.

Ray stepped aside. Frank put the carton in a bag and walked to the counter. Ray rang it up. Three dollars and forty-four cents. Frank paid with exact change, counting out the coins one by one on the counter, the way he always did.

"Thanks," Frank said.

"See you," Ray said.

Frank left. The bell above the door rang. Ray stood behind the counter and looked at the space where Frank had been standing and felt nothing. Not anger. Not sadness. Not relief. Nothing. The way you feel when you look at a wall and realize the wall is just a wall and there is nothing behind it.

He went back to restocking the candy bars.

At 5:00 PM, he locked the door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and went upstairs to his apartment. The apartment was small—one room, a kitchenette, a bathroom that smelled like mildew. The cat was on the windowsill, looking out at the street below. The cat was fat and lazy and content, which was something Ray was not.

He made dinner—canned soup, heated on the electric stove—and ate it at the table while the cat watched him from the windowsill with the indifferent gaze of a creature that had no interest in human problems.

After dinner, he washed the bowl and dried it and put it in the cupboard. He sat at the table and looked at the wall across from him. The wall was white and it had a crack in it that ran from the ceiling to the floor and he had been meaning to fix it for two years and hadn't.

He stood up and went to the closet and took out the box of letters. The box was cardboard and it was stained with something that might have been coffee or might have been something else. He sat at the table and opened the box and took out the letters and spread them on the table in front of him.

He didn't read them. He just looked at them. Ten years of letters, written in Frank's handwriting, in a hand that was careful and precise and controlled, the hand of a man who wrote every word with the knowledge that it might one day be read by someone else and that the someone else would be the person he had wronged.

Ray picked up one letter at random and read the first sentence: "Stan, I don't know if you'll ever read this, but I need to say it."

He put the letter down. He picked up another. "I've thought about calling you a hundred times. I've picked up the phone a hundred times. I've put it down a hundred times."

He put that one down too. He picked up a third. "The factory is failing. I don't know what to do. You always knew how to run it better than I did."

He put that one down. He closed the box. He put the letters back inside. He closed the lid.

He sat at the table for a while, looking at the box. Then he stood up and carried it to the shelf in the corner, where he kept things he couldn't throw away and couldn't use—old tools, broken lamps, a chair with one leg shorter than the others.

He put the box on the shelf. He looked at it one more time. Then he went to the window and sat on the windowsill and watched the street below, where a car drove past with its headlights on, where a dog barked somewhere, where the wind moved through the bare branches of the tree across the street, making a sound like pages turning.

He didn't know what he was going to do with the letters. He didn't know if he was going to do anything with them at all. He just knew that they were there, on the shelf in the corner, and that they were part of his life, the way the crack in the wall was part of his life, the way the cat on the windowsill was part of his life—things that existed and that he carried and that he would carry until he didn't have to carry them anymore.

Or until he decided he didn't want to.

Either way, the town kept going. The factory stayed closed. The laundromat below him kept running. The convenience store on Route 9 would open at six in the morning and Ray would unlock the door and turn the sign to OPEN and stand behind the counter and wait for the customers to come.

That was all there was.

OTMES v2: DRK-2000-OHIO-APATHY-4ACT-1240W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM