The woman holding my mail looked at me for a few seconds before she opened the door any wider. She said she had been expecting me, although she didn’t know when I’d come. I asked why she had my mother’s estate mail, and she said it wasn’t just my mother’s mail. For six weeks, everything addressed to me had been arriving at that house, including bank statements, insurance notices, and letters from people I hadn’t spoken to in years. Then she handed me a stack of envelopes that had never been opened.
I asked her who had arranged for the mail to be forwarded there, and she said she didn’t know. The first envelope had arrived in February, with my handwriting on the change-of-address form, and she had assumed I was the person who filed it. When I told her I’d never signed anything, she went inside and came back with a photocopy of the form. The signature looked exactly like mine, but the woman pointed to something I’d completely missed: the forwarding address wasn’t actually her current address. It was the address as it appeared in an old directory from 1988.
I told her I’d lived there when I was younger, and she said that explained why someone had chosen it. Then she showed me a second piece of mail that had arrived the same week, addressed to my mother but marked “return to sender.” My mother had been dead for years. I asked why anyone would redirect her mail to a house from my childhood, and the woman said she’d wondered the same thing. She had opened the envelope only because she thought it might contain something important, and inside was a photocopy of a document with my mother’s name on it.
I recognized the handwriting immediately. It wasn’t mine, but it looked almost identical to my mother’s. At the bottom was a date from 1988 and a sentence written in the margin that made the woman stop talking. I read it twice before I understood what it meant. “If the mail ever comes back here, don’t give it to her until she asks about the house.”
