There was just a spreadsheet, somewhere, in an office I’ll never see, and on the spreadsheet Rural Route Four did not pay for itself, and spreadsheets do not have a column for the thing I actually do.

Chapter 3 — Emmitt

If you want to understand what they were really cutting, you have to understand Emmitt Wilkes, who lives at the very end of the route, in the last house before the road turns to the county’s problem instead of mine.

Emmitt is eighty-five.

His wife, Ruth, passed six years back, and his children are scattered to three states, good kids, they call, but calling isn’t the same as coming, and mostly what Emmitt has, day to day, is me.

I pull up to his box at around two-fifteen every afternoon, and most days Emmitt is on the porch, because he’s figured out my schedule the way you figure out the tides, and if it’s a day with real mail I walk it up to him, and if it isn’t I walk up an empty hand anyway and we talk for a few minutes about the weather and his tomatoes and whatever his knee is doing.