The Wrong Address

The first parcel arrived on a freezing Tuesday in January. Gwen Taylor found it on her doorstep when she came home from work: a small, heavy box wrapped in brown paper, addressed to Mrs. R. Fernandez, 14 Maple Crescent, Ottawa. Gwen had lived at 14 Maple Crescent for twenty-two years, and nobody called Fernandez had ever lived there with her.

She assumed it was a simple mistake and left it with the post office the next morning. A week later, a second parcel arrived. Then a third. By the beginning of February, there were four of them on her hall table, all the same size, all from the same online bookshop, and all addressed to the mysterious Mrs. Fernandez.

Gwen was a retired history teacher, and she had always enjoyed a puzzle. One evening, with a cup of tea and a notepad, she sat down and tried to work it out. The previous owners of her house had been called Wilson, so it couldn't be a former resident. The courier might have been confusing her street with another one, but the address on the label was printed perfectly clearly. That meant the mistake had probably been made when the order was placed.

She picked up one of the boxes and shook it gently. Books, obviously. And from the weight, large ones. Then she noticed a line of small print on the label that she hadn't seen before: Large print edition. Gwen put the box down slowly. Someone who orders large print books every week, she thought, must have poor eyesight and plenty of time to read. It was probably someone elderly. And someone who reads that much might be living alone.

The next morning, she looked at a map of the neighborhood. There was no other Maple Crescent in Ottawa, but there was a Maple Court, a short street of small houses behind the church, less than ten minutes' walk away. If somebody had been typing the address quickly, or if somebody's phone had corrected it automatically, Court could easily have become Crescent.

Gwen put the four parcels in a shopping bag and walked over. Number 14 Maple Court was a small yellow house with a neat garden, now buried under snow. The path to the door hadn't been cleared, and there were no footprints on it. Gwen felt a little uneasy. Either the owner had been away for a while, or she hadn't been able to go out.

It took a long time for the door to open. The woman who opened it was tiny, at least eighty, and wearing thick glasses and two cardigans. When Gwen explained, her face changed completely. "My books!" she said. "I thought I had been robbed! My grandson set up the account for me before he went back to Vancouver, and when nothing arrived, I thought someone must have stolen my money. I was too embarrassed to tell him."

Her name was Rosa Fernandez. She had come to Canada from Chile fifty years earlier, had worked as a nurse until she retired, and had lost her husband three years before. Since then, she admitted, she hardly ever left the house in winter. The sidewalks were too icy, and her eyes were getting worse. Reading was the main thing that filled her days. Without her books, the past month must have felt very long.

Gwen stayed for two hours. Rosa made strong coffee and talked about Santiago, about hospital night shifts in the seventies, about her husband's terrible singing. Walking home in the dark, Gwen kept thinking about how close she had come to sending the parcels back. She could have returned them all to the post office and forgotten about them. Rosa could have spent the whole winter believing she had been robbed.

Gwen never did tell the bookshop about the wrong address. She preferred to deliver the parcels herself. Every Tuesday she walks over to Maple Court, clears the snow from the path, and stays for coffee. Sometimes, when Rosa's eyes are tired, Gwen reads aloud to her. They are halfway through a very long Russian novel, and neither of them is in any hurry to finish it.