It ran through one person.

I was a single thread, and a single thread can break — I could get sick, I did get sick sometimes, I could retire, and I was retiring, and when the thread breaks, everything strung on it falls.

What Darlene built with her spiral notebook was not a thread but a net, a web, every house tied to a neighbor and the neighbors tied to each other, so that no single break could drop anyone.

If Krista can’t get to Emmitt one day, the Bakkes are there.

If the Bakkes are away, someone else.

The seeing stopped depending on one woman in a truck and became a property of the road itself, distributed, redundant, unbreakable in the way a web is unbreakable where a thread is not.