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Fup. Store Cat.
The Trip to Kahani
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Bear
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Zooey
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"Hold on just one second," the man interrupts, retrieving a log from Zooey's pile and placing it carefully atop the burning kindling. "Sorry," he apologizes. "Please, go on."
The new log catches and a fat orange flame wags above the wood.
Fup continues, "Anyway, Mr. Warren had been working there for as long as anyone could remember. He liked to impress tourists passing through to the coast by guessing their hometown zip code to the third or fourth digit. But for all he'd learned from maps and postmarks, he hadn't left his home state since the fifties."
How to explain the mood inside the mail truck? Speeding south along the turnpike with Warren at the wheel, Fup and her sisters had no idea where they were going. If their parents knew, they weren't saying. But somehow it didn't seem so frightening, not at first.
In the post office, Warren listened to the radio all day. First thing upon his arrival each morning, he'd turn on the local station, and Tom and Carol's familiar voices would fill the front room. Riding in the back of the truck, aside from the rattling and the turning and the roar of the road beneath them, well, how different was it? Warren talked back to Tom and Carol as he always did, and sang along with the occasional old records they played.
Until, near Brunswick, when the reception began to fade. By the time they reached Yarmouth, Warren could barely fish a word or two from the static.
"We listened to static all the way into New Hampshire," Fup remembers. "It wasn't until we'd crossed the big green bridge out of Maine that Mr. Warren finally switched off the radio. 'Take care, Tom,' we heard him mumble up in the front seat. 'So long, Carol.' And for the rest of the drive he never turned on the radio again."
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