The Letter

The post had been sitting on the dashboard for three days.

Étienne picked it up from the box in the morning, dropped it beside his coffee cup, and drove off. At midday he ate in the van, his back against the door, and in the evening he came home with the same envelopes wedged under the windscreen, one more day faded. There were two delivery notes, a reminder from the URSSAF he knew by heart, a heat-pump catalogue he would throw away unopened, and a white envelope with a blue edge and, in the corner, two words in small capitals: TRIBUNAL JUDICIAIRE.

He opened it on the Thursday, parked on the rue des Oiseaux, waiting for his customer to come back from the chemist. His hands were black. He slid his thumb under the flap, holding the envelope by a clean corner.

He read it twice.

The first time to understand that he was not being accused of anything. The second time to understand the rest.

You have been selected by lot to appear on the annual jury list of the assize court. You are summoned on Friday 12 September at half past eight for the empanelling of the jury for the session opening on the following Monday, expected to last thirteen days of hearings.

Then, lower down, in the same typeface, the thing that stopped him:

A juror who fails, without legitimate reason, to answer this summons is liable to a fine of 3,750 euros.

Three thousand seven hundred and fifty euros. He looked at the figure for a long moment. It was not a round sum invented to frighten people. It was a calculated sum, with hundreds and tens in it, the sum of somebody who had already had to claim it.

The customer came back with her chemist's bag. Madame Vialat, eighty-one, a wall-mounted boiler from 2006 that he kept alive out of habit and stubbornness. He folded the letter in three, slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket, and went back up.

The problem was not the heat exchanger. The problem was the expansion vessel, which no longer held pressure and had to be repressurised every two months, which is not a repair, it is an appointment. He connected the gauge. Zero point four. He pumped it up, bled the bedroom radiator, brought it back to one point two, and listened to the pump pick up again, that small sound of water moving that he had liked for nineteen years.

— Is it mended? Madame Vialat called from the hall.

— It's holding, said Étienne. That's not the same thing.

She laughed. She laughed at everything he said, which obliged him to be careful about what he said.

In the van, before starting the engine, he took the letter out again.

Thirteen days. He counted on his fingers against the steering wheel, like an idiot, twice, because he could not believe that a court could take thirteen days from a man without asking him. Thirteen days was the bakery boiler that had to be replaced before the first frosts. It was Charlot's job, the six radiators on the first floor. It was the annual service on fourteen contracts that had to be finished by the end of October.

And it was September. The month when the phone starts ringing again. The month when people switch the heating on and discover that nothing comes on.

He started the engine, drove to the workshop, and said nothing about it to Bruno.

It was not a decision. Bruno was under a boiler, only the bottom of his jeans and his boots showing, and Étienne told himself he would mention it tomorrow, which is a sentence people use when they do not want to speak yet.

He got home at ten past seven.

Lou was doing her homework at the kitchen table, surrounded by her equipment like a small building site: the pencil case open, three felt-tips that served no purpose, a rubber cut in half. Théo was upstairs; you could hear the ceiling moving. Karine had put the pasta on and was turning something in a pan.

— There's post on the sideboard, she said.

— I took mine.

He hung his jacket over the back of the chair. The letter was inside it, in the breast pocket, folded in three, and he felt it when he sat down, that small thickness against the cloth.

— Good day? she asked.

— The Vialat place. Still her vessel.

— Are you ever going to change it?

— She won't have it. She says it will last as long as she does.

Karine laughed too, and put the dish down on the cork mat they had had since the wedding, burnt on one side. Lou moved her things without being asked. Théo came down, ate a lot and fast, and said three sentences, two of which were questions about the weekend.

At one point, between the main course and the yoghurt, there was that ordinary silence of tables where everybody knows everybody, and Étienne thought: now. All he had to say was I got something from the court. Six words. Karine would have asked what, he would have shown her the letter, they would have looked at the calendar together, she would have got angry on his behalf about the thirteen days, and it would have been an annoyance like any other, shared, digested, forgotten.

He said:

— Is there any bread left?

Lou passed him the basket.

Later, when the house had gone dark, he came back down for a glass of water. His jacket was still on the chair. He took the letter out and read it a third time, standing in the kitchen under the cooker light, and there was a line he had not seen.

Case listed: Public Prosecutor and Madame Michèle G. against Monsieur Karim L., accused of murder. On appeal.

Appeal. He did not know what that meant, in that place, in a sentence like that.

He put the letter back in the pocket, and went up to bed without saying anything.