The Route

I decided I would tell each of them myself, in person, at their boxes, rather than let them find out from a form letter the way I had.

It was the last thing the route could do for them, and the hardest, and it took me most of a month.

I told the Petersens, and the mother cried, and the kids didn’t understand yet what they were losing.

I told the Bakkes over their fence.

I told the fighting young couple, who stopped fighting long enough to look genuinely stricken, because even people whose lives are chaos are steadied by the one fixed thing, and I had been theirs.

And I drove out to Odell Prewett’s, the hermit, and stood at his box until he came out, which took a while, and I told him too, plainly, that after spring there’d be no more mail down his road, that he’d have to go to the highway.