I have been retired now for two years, and I still live at the near end of what used to be my route, and I get my mail from a cluster box at the highway like everyone else, and I have made a strange sort of peace with it that I did not expect to make.

The road held.

That’s the thing I most want to tell you.

I was so afraid it would go dark, that the cluster box would scatter my people back into their separate silences, and it didn’t, because the seeing they built that last winter turned out to be sturdier than the mail ever was.

Krista still sits with Emmitt most afternoons — she’s got a real job now, at the county office, that the Bakkes’ reference helped her land, but she stops by Emmitt’s on her way home, and Rennie calls him Grandpa Em, and none of them are related to any of the others by a single drop of blood.

The phone tree still runs.