I met her in the driveway. It was cold. She had a knit hat on and she looked, for the first time since the whole thing began, like a woman who had come to do a job rather than a woman getting through a day.

“The mailbox,” she said.

“You don’t have to do the mailbox.”

“Dad.”

So we did the mailbox.

It took most of the morning. The post had been sitting crooked in that hole since Daniel backed his truck into it and laughed and promised he’d fix it, and there was rot in the bottom eighteen inches, and the concrete came up in three pieces.