Chapter 4 — What Virgil Left Me

I should tell you that I am, myself, one of the alone ones out here, because it matters to what the route is to me, and I don’t want you thinking I’m only writing about other people’s loneliness.

My husband, Virgil, died young — we were forty-one, both of us, an aneurysm, no warning, here in the morning and gone by noon — and we never had children, we’d tried and it hadn’t come and we’d made our peace with just the two of us, and then it was just the one of me, and it has been the one of me for eighteen years now.

I live alone in the house Virgil and I bought, at the near end of my own route, which means I deliver mail to my own box some days, another small joke the job hands you.

And I will tell you the truth that I have never told anyone: the route saved my life after Virgil.

In those first black years when the house was a tomb and I could not see the point of my own continuing, the route was the thing that made me get up.