Paper

The guy came to the door, asking me to order a subscription to the paper. I hadn't done the news-thing in awhile, and the deal was uber-cheap so I signed up. Figured my six year old could practice reading on the headlines.

The next thing I knew, the papers started coming. First it was one a day. Then two. I thought two was a bit odd, but maybe the paperboy was shortchanging his route, or trying to make extra bucks?

Then one day I got four. That's right, four. How is it that a single Mom in a 2 bedroom bungalow needs four papers every day? What was the delivery guy thinking? I checked my bank account, to make sure I wasn't being charged for all of this multiplicity. I wasn't.

Took me a week--and by that time I was getting six papers a day--but I found the guy's number and phoned him. He didn't answer, so I left a message on his machine. No big surprise that he didn't return the call.

I left him six messages, a kind of "code" so that he'd know which irate customer I was. He never phoned me back.

My house didn't have room for all of the paper. The recycle truck only picks up every other week. My kids started to build forts out of all of the stacks. When the two-year-old climbed to the top of one pile, fell off, and broke her collar bone, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I'm not one to get up at three o'clock in the morning to catch a paperboy in the act of delivering, but a five hour trip to a hospital with a toddler can change a mom's perspective. So I sat with a big cup of coffee and waited.

The steam from the cup drifted through the morning haze. The street light flickered in front of Bill's house across the way. Moths drifted in and out of the bright places, dive-bombing over and over for the fake-sun.

Then the dark blue mini-van--black in the dim light--pulled around the corner and into view.