Five minutes.

Maybe ten.

It is, I have known for years and he has never once said, the only conversation Emmitt Wilkes has most days.

The only human voice that says his name out loud.

I am, whether the Postal Service intends it or not, the thing that stands between Emmitt and a silence so total it could swallow a man.

And when they put that cluster box at the highway, Emmitt — who does not drive anymore, whose knee is what it is, who is eighty-five years old — is going to have to figure out how to get himself two and a half miles up a gravel road to collect his sale flyers, and nobody is going to walk up his porch steps with an empty hand and ask about his tomatoes, and I have laid awake more nights than I’ll admit doing the arithmetic of that, and there is no good answer in it.