Chapter 11 — The Phone Tree

It started with Darlene and a spiral notebook at Emmitt’s kitchen table, and it grew into the thing I am proudest of in thirty-one years of a job I was proud of every day.

Before she flew back to Ohio, Darlene drove the whole route with me one Saturday — all forty-two miles, box to box — and I introduced her to it the way you’d introduce someone to a family, this is the Petersens, this is where Odell won’t come out but leaves the honey, this is Krista and the baby, this is the Coleman place.

And Darlene wrote it all down.

And what she built, over that winter, on the phone from Ohio, was a thing so simple it should have existed all along: a list.

Every house on Rural Route Four, and next to it a name and a number — a neighbor, a nearby cousin, somebody — whose job it now was to lay eyes on that house every day.