They gave me my party in the church basement the day my name came down off the post-office window, six years back now. The ladies had the long tables up and the big steel coffee urn going, the one that only comes down for this and for funerals, and somebody's husband had carried down folding chairs enough for the whole town, and near enough the whole town came and sat in them. There was a sheet cake with my name spelled right and my years spelled wrong, thirty-one where it should have read thirty and eleven months, and I did not correct a living soul, because a woman does not stand up at her own party and dock the cake a month.
After the coffee had gone round twice, a man I had sold stamps to since he wore short pants got up with his paper cup and put it to me straight. It was over now, he said. My name was off the glass and the window was closed, so surely I could turn one loose at last. Just the one. One good one out of thirty years.
And the whole basement leaned in, the coffee going cold in their hands because the good part was coming at last. They were not being cruel. They were being a town, which is a warmer thing than cruel and a hungrier one. And the floor tilted toward the easy thing, dear. There was one I could have given them, a good one, the kind a room carries home and tells for years, and it would have cost nobody, because everyone who stood inside it is up the hill in the churchyard now and not one of them could mind. The window had shown it to me across my own counter, and no mouth had ever said a word of it out loud, then or since. It was right there behind my teeth.
I had kept that rule for thirty years and eleven months and never once had to ask why. It came on in the morning with the drawer key, and I had always supposed it came off at night when the drawer was locked, the two of them a set. But they had lifted my name off the glass at four o'clock that afternoon, and Monday the window belonged to somebody else, and if the rule was only the window's then the rule was over, and I was standing in a church basement about to find out whose rule it had been the whole time.
So I gave them one. I set my cup down and told them about my first morning at that window, which not one living soul had ever heard, because I had made sure of that as well. They had put the ring of keys in my hand the Friday before and told me the door opened at eight sharp and the town set its watch by it. Monday I was on that step at a quarter to, thirty-seven and brand new, and not one key on the ring would turn the lock. I tried them round one way and I tried them back the other, and my hand only got worse with every try, and it came up ten to eight, and I was not going to be the postmistress who could not get into her own post office on the first morning of it. So I went round the back. There is a window over the sink in that back room, painted but never once stuck, and I got it up and climbed in over the sink in my good coat, and I came round front and drew the bolt from the inside and opened my door on the stroke of eight with the flag run up. The first man in the line told me the lock had fought me. I said it stuck in the damp. It never stuck again in thirty years, dear, on account of it had never stuck. It was a brand-new girl turning a good key the wrong way with the whole town waiting on her, and I would have gone back out that window sooner than say so.
And the basement laughed, good and loud, and somebody hollered they had always wondered about that first door, and the ladies cut the cake a second time, and they let me be. I let them think that was the good one. It was a good one. It only cost me, and the other one stayed up the hill where it belonged.
The window closed behind me that afternoon and stayed closed. Monday I would be down at that lobby at eight all the same, on the far side of the glass now, with my own key to my own box, same as anybody in town, and the girl who took my window would nod me a good morning and get no more out of me than the town ever had in thirty years. The rule came home with me that afternoon. It had been mine the whole time, working or retired, and I had only been too busy keeping it to notice.
Before I went up those basement stairs I carried the cake plate to the church kitchen, the good glass one that belongs to the kitchen and to none of the ladies in particular. I washed it in the deep sink and dried it with the towel off the nail and set it in the rack where it lives. Thirty years and eleven months, and a clean plate put back where it goes.