Michael Malone - Weebly

"Of course not. Yes, you must know all our secrets,
all our lives passing through your hands day after day."
She frowned, blushing. "It's very impersonal. I
mean, I don't look at them."
"No, of course not. But wait, wait, we are surely
old friends?" His overlarge blue eyes stared up at her
through the grille with an odd mixture of wryness and
expectation.
Mrs. Haig's mouth very slowly formed her serious
smile. "Yes," she answered. "Yes, we are."
"Then don't you wonder? Ask me something."
There was nothing she wanted to know. She
already knew two things about Sammy Smalter.
Because she was the postmistress, she could not avoid
knowing that he sent packages and letters to publishers,
that he received packages and letters back. For the
same reason that she felt her husband John's pain
before he felt it, she could not avoid knowing that Mr.
Smalter was, hard for her to say the phrase, in love with
her. It was unavoidably present in his eyes, as was his
effort not to reveal it. Her duty was not to give him the
pain of realizing that she saw it and pitied him for it. So