The mail’s not urgent; people miss a day.

But I am not anyone else, I am the person who has emptied that man’s box ten thousand times and knows his habits like my own heartbeat, and a full box at Emmitt’s meant something was wrong the way a missed note means something’s wrong to a musician.

I didn’t even finish parking.

I was up those porch steps and pounding on the door, and when he didn’t answer I went in — we don’t lock doors out here — and I found Emmitt on the kitchen floor where he’d been since the evening before, fallen, his hip gone, conscious but too weak to reach the phone, having lain there through a cold night calling for help that no one was close enough to hear.

Except that someone was coming.

Someone always came.