I called the ambulance and I got down on that cold floor and held his hand and I told him he was going to be fine, and he looked up at me and the first thing he said, the very first thing, through the pain, was: “I knew you’d see the box.” I knew you’d see the box.

That is the route.

That is the whole thing they’re about to put in a metal cluster at the highway.

That is what doesn’t fit in the spreadsheet’s column.

I have turned that sentence over ten thousand times since. I knew you’d see the box. Think about what it means that an old man, alone on his kitchen floor through a freezing November night, his hip shattered, unable to reach a phone, did not despair — because some steady animal part of him knew, the way he knew the sun would come up, that at two-fifteen the next afternoon a woman in a mail truck would notice one day’s mail sitting uncollected and come pounding on his door.

That knowledge was the thing that got him through the night.