The Bakkes, who for a decade had drunk his coffee in silence and thought of him as the odd man up the road, stood up and said true things about a neighbor they’d come to love in the act of keeping him alive.

And I sat in the back of that little country church and thought about the seven words Odell said to me at his box, the day I told him the route was ending — who’s going to know if I’m dead, then — and I thought, they knew, Odell.

They knew within the day.

You asked the question that terrified you most, the question every solitary soul on that road was carrying, and the road answered it.

Not the Postal Service.

Not me.