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poured a tall glass and drank it as he stood there. He had even dreamed of milk during the night, so thirsty had he been. He dreamed of walking down the aisles of the local IGA, asking clerk after clerk, “Where do you keep the milk?” That’s when the IGA had turned into a huge field of talking cows. “Here’s where we keep the milk, asshole,” one of them said. Larry had knelt by this talking cow and reached for the teats, hoping to milk her and quench his thirst. Only it wasn’t leathery teats hanging from the cow’s udder. What he held in his hands, and was still holding when he woke seconds later, was the leather mail pouch. Thinking of this now, in the bright sun of day, Larry smiled as he finished the milk. He rinsed his glass and left it in the sink, not caring that his mother would find it and know he’d been there. An empty plastic sack lay on the table, the kind that came full of groceries from the IGA. Larry opened it and stood before his mother’s slide-out pantry. A jar of crunchy peanut butter was the first item into the bag, along with a box of saltine crackers, a jar of pickles, and two cans of tuna fish. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw his mother just leaving the cucumber beds and heading for the sweet peas.
    In the silverware drawer, Larry found a can opener, a fork, a spoon, and a knife. They clinked against the cans in the bottom of the sack. From a plate on the counter, he grabbed a chocolate doughnut and bit into it, leaving it in his mouth while he opened the cupboard door where the gallons of water were stored. He pulled one out. On the way back through the kitchen, he grabbed two apples out of the fruit bowl. He had never been a Boy Scout, had never possessed the kind of “group mentality” he felt it took to join such an organization. Henry was more the Boy Scout type and had excelled, his earned merit badges often discussed at the dinner table while Larry scooted a few peas around with his fork, waiting for praise of Henry to subside. It had never really bothered him that Henry seemed cut from a better cloth than he was. He loved his younger brother too much, and love can cushion anything, even jealousy.
    Back in his room, Larry made himself a breakfast of peanut butter and crackers and ate it while sitting on his bed, his back propped against the wall. He would save the tuna fish and pickles for lunch. He drank water from the throat of the plastic jug and then selected the larger of the two apples. It oozed a sweet juice the moment his teeth broke through the red skin. He finished the apple in a few quick bites and then reached into the leather mail pouch to select another letter, this one personal. The envelope was yellow and smelled of lilacs. Why did some people odorize and perfume their mail? There were days when Larry’s pouch smelled like the perfume counter at Fillmore’s Drugstore. He gave a cursory glance at the return address in the upper left corner: Sheila Dewberry, 1013 Cedar Grove Court, Sioux City, Iowa . It had been sent to a Miss Stella Peabody, the town librarian whose beige nut of a house sat catty-corner on Thorncliffe Street, next to the future site of Bixley’s second McDonald’s.
    Larry took the knife he’d found in his mother’s silverware drawer and inserted it beneath the sealed flap of the envelope. He cut his way slowly and neatly along the glued line until the letter was opened. He took it out of its envelope and lay back on the bed, head on his pillow and sheet pulled up to his waist. His own father never opened an envelope without his silver-plated letter opener, a knifelike apparatus that was inscribed with the initials LSM, Lawrence Simon Munroe , which had been given to the first Lawrence Munroe ever to be entrusted with the government’s mail, upon the event of his retirement in 1928. “This will be yours one day, Larry,” his father liked to remind him as he held the