The Bakkes discovered that watching over Odell meant occasionally, wordlessly, drinking his coffee, which nobody had done in a decade.

The road was waking up to itself.

And I understood that this, too, was a thing the spreadsheet couldn’t see, but running the other way — that maybe the cluster box at the highway, this thing I’d been grieving as pure loss, was going to force a scattered people to become, at last, actual neighbors, to hold each other directly instead of through a woman in a truck.

It didn’t make the loss not a loss.

But it made it not only a loss, and on the hard days that last winter, that was enough to drive on.

I kept a kind of private tally, those last months, of the road waking up to itself, and it was the sweetest bookkeeping I ever did.