The Second Notebook

# Chapter 1: The Envelope on the Kitchen Table

The kitchen smelled like coffee and cantaloupe.

Carmen was at the counter with the cutting board and the good knife, the one with the wooden handle that had gone dark from twenty years of her grip. She cut the melon in half, then quarters, then worked the blade along the rind in that steady curve she had never taught me and I had never learned. The seeds went into the bowl she kept for compost. The slices went onto the blue plate.

Saturday morning. Day 105, though I had stopped counting days the way other people counted them. For me it was simpler than that. It was the first Saturday in June, warm enough that we had left the kitchen window cracked overnight, and the air coming through it carried the smell of the neighbor's jasmine and something else underneath, wet concrete from the city crew that had been patching the sidewalk on the next block over since Thursday.

The mail was on the table.

Carmen had brought it in when she came back from the porch, where she checked the planters every morning before the coffee finished. She set it in front of my spot without sorting it, the way she always did on Saturdays. During the week I was gone before the carrier came. Saturdays the mail was mine to open.