That is the thing about a good invisible system: it lets everyone off the hook, and the letting-off is a mercy right up until the system ends, at which point you discover that no one was actually holding the rope, or rather that one tired woman was holding it for ninety people and calling it a job.

Diffusion, they call it, when a crowd watches someone in trouble and no one helps because each assumes another will.

My whole route was a slow-motion version of that — ninety families each assuming the seeing was handled, and it was, by me, until it wasn’t going to be, and the terrible gift of my leaving was that it forced every one of them to look up from their assuming and understand that the somebody they’d been counting on was about to be gone, and the seeing was going to have to become theirs, or become no one’s.

She got quiet.

And then Emmitt’s daughter, whose name is Darlene, said, “Well.

That’s not going to work for us.” And I watched something turn over in her face that I would come to recognize, over the next months, turning over in face after face on that road — the moment a person stops assuming somebody else is doing the seeing, and realizes it’s going to have to be them.