I had thirty-one years of being the answer, and come spring I would be an answer to no one, and neither would anyone else, and the road would go dark house by house, each of my people alone with the same question Odell had finally said out loud.

I want to say something about Odell Prewett, because he is the one the world would write off fastest — the hermit, the recluse, the strange silent man who won’t come out — and because he is the one who taught me the deepest thing I know about my job.

For eleven years Odell said almost nothing to me.

He was not unfriendly; he was simply done with people, had been burned by them somewhere back before my time in a way nobody knew the shape of, and had withdrawn into his house and his bees and his silence, and asked only to be left alone.

And I left him alone.

But left alone is not the same as abandoned, and the difference between them is the whole of what I did out there.