I still carry mail on Maple Street. Somebody bought his house, painted the door blue, put flowers in where his weeds used to be. The window’s the same window though. And every time I walk past it I think about that Christmas, and the way he stood there one second too long, and how I never once asked that man a single thing about himself.

I never even knew her name. His little girl. I delivered to him for twenty-six years and I never knew he’d had a daughter at all. That’s the thing I can’t put down. He listened to all of us for years, learned our whole lives through a crack in a window, and not one of us, not even me, ever leaned in close enough to hear his.