At eight o’clock this morning, I found that I could not start the truck. I forgot that I had thrown away the key the night before. Once I dug it out of the trash can, where it was hiding under pieces of the letter that used to be above the mantle, I was ready to go, and only a couple of minutes behind schedule. But every time my hand touched the metal, I remembered the road I was about to take and where it was going to take me, the same road I’ve taken every day for the past fifty years, except Sunday. The thing is, I didn’t think I’d be able to see the Stewart’s house again. After all those years, would I be able to make it past the wilting pink and blue flowers, or the tree stump out front with its rot and its bugs, or the dark, smudged windows in the front? Eventually, knowing that I had no choice, I turned the key and started the truck, and it was just like always.
     Driving along this road, starting at the beginning, it gets me thinking. Of course, I remember it all so clearly. Like it was yesterday, while really it all ended yesterday. I watch the sidewalk roll by like a film strip rewinding and remember it all. There’s so much to remember.
     The very first day was a Monday. A Monday in August, the second or third. It was the day the move-in vans appeared in the dingy driveway of an even dingier house. The first time I saw it, I thought the house was unattractive. Gnarly gray paint was peeling off the sides, and I could see that a lot of the shingles on the roof had fallen. There were two larger windows in the front, like the frame of a door turned on its side, and a few smaller ones towards the top. I would never have noticed the house if the sunrise-colored windows hadn’t caught my attention, next to the enormous vans in the driveway. The whole thing reminded me of an old computer starting up again, an empty box coming back to life. Still, for that first night, I managed to forget about it.
     The next week, I noticed a man in the front yard. He seemed fairly young. Younger than I was, at least. He was thin and a little bit short, but his hair was neatly combed and his arms moved carefully and steadily as he guided a paint roller up and down the walls. The run-down house was getting a makeover; most of the wall now dripped with cheerful yellow paint. To his left I noticed some movement in the window. A woman with dirty blonde hair and a pointy smile was wiping away at it with a paper towel. She looked about the same age as the man nearby; I assumed they were newly married. One by one, she cleared rows of glass on her side of the window, the peachy light behind her highlighting the dust in the places she left behind. She did the job right, though, for the most part. The only remaining dust lurked in the corners.
     Mail began to come in shortly after they began touching up their home. I was eager to learn the names of the new family in town. I glanced down at the bills and magazines as I slipped them into their rusty green mailbox. Their names, I learned, were Mark and Amy Stewart. They were easy to remember.
     Mark Stewart swiftly finished painting his new house. It was a relief to see the sunny yellow paint replace the peeling white, like clouds clearing up. It made the house look newer, as if it had just been built. I was impressed.
     One night that week I went home to my own house and wondered what it would look like with that same yellow paint. I knew it would be hard to accomplish; I’d lived there as long as I bothered to remember, and the floorboards were already creaking with every step, as they still do today, no matter what room I’m in. It would be hard to paint yellow over the dark gray walls that are already there. The harsh color would show through behind it. It would need multiple coats. Maybe one day, I had thought, as I sank into the moldy cushions of my sticky sofa. I fell asleep watching TV.
That spring, their first spring, Amy Stewart planted flowers in front of the house. Before summer arrived the soft pink buds had begun to bloom all across the front of the house. I watched the flowers grow day by day. They made their property even brighter, even happier than it had been before. I got to see them every day. I could have sworn they grew taller every time I passed by.
     As time rolled along, the Stewarts seemed to become fairly well-known throughout the neighborhood. On one cold December night, I stopped by to deliver their mail to find six or seven different cars parked along the side of the road. When I rolled down the window, I could hear movement and laughter from inside the house, like a soup bubbling in the distance. Twinkling lights were wrapped around a tree beside the house, making it present even in the looming black behind it. The orange glow from inside was alive as always. It made me feel warm, as if it were an oven.
     The Stewarts got letters from their parents quite frequently. On June 19, or maybe a couple of days before that, Mark Stewart received cards from people who all shared the same name. I guessed that they were his brother, his sister, and his parents. Each one had written from Oregon, all the way across the country. These cards, I later realized, would arrive on the same day every year. June 19. Of course it was his birthday. I made sure I didn’t forget.
     I noticed one night that they had replaced their sunrise-colored lights with cleaner ones that made the house brighter. The new lights even reached outside the house and spread out across the grass, and they glinted off of the mailbox, too. The Stewarts also replaced their roof, but this was more regular. Every once in a while I noticed that it would start to fade, turning from a solid black to a sadder gray, and they always fixed it right as I started to notice. I knew the last thing they wanted was for their roof to collapse on them. I wouldn’t have wanted that, either.
     The end of a summer brought pink balloons tied to the post of their mailbox. One day, when I searched through the letters, I noticed a new name, written in large curly letters on the back of a lemon yellow envelope. It was Molly Stewart. I thought it had a nice ring to it. I looked at the second floor windows of the house and saw that one of them, one that had always been dark, was now illuminated. Their family was growing. I arrived home that night and made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, then ate all twelve of them.
     Since children can’t leave the house on their own, the first time I saw Molly was not until much later. She was almost six months old. I was sliding the magazines and bills and things into their mailbox when the front door peeped open and Amy came creeping out with her daughter strapped to her chest in a baby Bjorn. She had blue eyes like the sky and a shiny head, which was starting to sprout some hair but still shimmered like a wrecking ball. Somehow, I knew she would grow up to do great things. I would get to witness her life from the street.
     Before I knew it, I was measuring their lives in years instead of months. I got to oversee every one of their letters. In the mornings I found myself looking forward to checking up on them. It became part of my everyday routine. I felt like I knew them, even if they didn’t know me. They felt like family.
     As I got to know them, I took note of where their mail came from, and when, and who, and why. On the holidays they always got letters from far away. Amy’s parents were from Georgia. She also had a sister there. Their letters came with elegant cursive addresses that I could barely read. I bet they loved sending their daughter mail. I bet she loved getting their mail. It must have been nice.
     It seemed like there was always a party going on at their house. It always amazed me how many cars would be parked along the side of the road, all different shapes and sizes. Sometimes I had to walk around them in order to get to the mailbox, but I didn’t mind. Walking brought me closer to their stew of life and laughter, and it always put me in a good mood. Sometimes, after arriving home from the Stewarts’ bustling parties, I picked up the phone and almost dialed my parents’ home phone number. But I always decided not to. They’re the kinds of people that like to be left alone. They retired a long time ago and moved to somewhere in the middle of Vermont where there are more cows than there are cell phones. Every time I tried to call them, it was easy to tell how quickly they jumped to goodbyes and shortened up our conversations. I hadn’t spoken to them in a while. So I put the phone down and forgot about it, every time.
     Anyways.
     Within a couple of years, Molly had learned to walk and started to talk and everything that comes at that age. Sometimes their driveway would become an art gallery of toddler ideas scribbled in pastel green and blue chalk, until it rained and it all washed away. Sometimes I saw her playing in the sprinklers with her parents, the three of them laughing and dripping and rolling through the neatly mown grass. I was shocked when I encountered her first report card, encased in a stately yellow packet. I got the sense she did well in school, or, at least, as well as a girl could do in elementary school. For some reason, I felt proud.
     Once she was old enough, Mark made a tire swing for Molly. It was tied firmly to a tree in their yard, the same one they had made a tradition of decorating every year for Christmas. The tire was thick and looked pretty heavy, but the tree held it up with ease. Through the seasons it remained there, always ready for Molly to sway it back and forth until the world ended.
     It was exciting to watch Molly Stewart continue to grow. I would catch her outside on her tire swing, laughing her head off, almost touching the highest branch. Occasionally Mark would be behind her, pushing her even higher into the sky. Molly seemed to love it. I would see her turn to him and smile, and he would return it stronger than ever. Amy would be leaning against the sunny walls, cheering them on and smiling with them.
     The Stewarts got postcards from all over the country. The family was like a heart, with arteries all across the country, connecting them to everything there is. The postcards they got were mostly pictures of magical-looking, far away places. Some of them, though, had pictures of families on the back, along with phrases like “Happy Easter!” or “Happy Thanksgiving!” All the families in the pictures were like alternate universes of Stewarts, with children and nice clothes and happy faces. Sometimes I thought about my own family.
     After years and years of watching the Stewarts grow, I returned home once and noticed that my house looked blank. No posters, no paintings, no picture frames. Not a single family photo. I clicked on the light in the back room of my house and searched through the boxes of things I’d kept through the years. I hadn’t looked through them since just after high school, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I would find. When I opened the first box, it was three-quarters of the way full with packing peanuts, and the rest was a collection of books I didn’t remember reading. Another box was full of wooden sculptures I had made in school, and another had a few deflated balls and broken toys. And then I ran out of boxes. I turned the lights off, closed the door and made myself some microwave mac and cheese.
     Anyways.
     Every year, four times a year, Molly received report cards in the mail. It was so tempting to hold them and put them in the mailbox, never being able to open them and see how she was doing. I knew she must have gotten nothing but good grades, because her parents raised her right, but it would have been nice to see all the A’s in person.
     Ten, or maybe twelve years into their life, a letter with a red wax seal popped out at me from their pile. It was addressed to Molly Stewart in neat cursive writing. I picked it up and sat still for a moment, reading every word on the envelope. It had been sent from a school called Hampton Academy. I had heard of it before. It was an expensive private school for sixth to twelfth graders, about twenty minutes from town. I took a look at their house, the yellow paint still cheering up the edges, and I wondered if they would be able to afford a school like that. Part of me hoped they didn’t send Molly there. I didn’t want her so far away. How would she have time to play on her tire swing?
     It happened anyway. That fall, their family car boasted a new decoration, a Hampton Academy sticker on the back window.
     Luckily, it didn’t change much. Every winter, I still saw her snowmen in the front yard, waving to me. I saw her with her family through their picture-frame window, eating dinner and being happy together. I saw her tire swing was beginning to look softer, so she must have been using it as often as ever. The lights were always on in their living room. I was relieved.
     One year in December, when Molly must have been halfway through middle school, I remember stopping in the road, sitting in the driver’s seat of the mail truck, and staring at their house for a moment. The twinkling lights were strung across the tree again, and this time they were accompanied by a few light-up reindeer standing in the snowy front yard. Icicles dangled from the rim of their roof, below a cozy blanket of snow. It struck me how complete the scene was. When I opened the mailbox, every light from the house reflected off it and into my eyes. I thought of all the mail that leaves that mailbox, and how far it all goes. In the dark, the house looked a bit like a mailbox, too. I was inspired. That night, I hopped out of the truck and skipped straight to the phone on the kitchen counter. I called my parents and asked them to come spend Christmas with me.
     I took almost a week off from work, Monday to Sunday, and my parents arrived in town that Tuesday. My mother, as expected, greeted me with a tired hug and a confused smile full of false teeth, before stepping past me and scoffing, “You still live here?” All I got from my father was a stingy “hello” before he wilted into the couch and tuned in to channel forty-one. Of course, it was what I expected, so I was thrilled to have the family together again.
     Christmas was on a Thursday that year. On Christmas Eve, I bought a plastic tree and set it up next to the TV, while my parents fell asleep to children’s movies about elves and reindeer. I asked them to help me hang bulbs and tinsel on the tree, but my father complained about “getting old” and my mother didn’t hear me. So I decorated the tree myself. That night I offered them the guest room next to mine, but they opted to sleep on the furniture in the living room because the guest room didn’t have a TV.
     On Christmas day, I put on some cheerful music and enjoyed the bright weather outside. My parents stayed in bed for most of the day until they got hungry. I lit a fire in the fireplace, but my parents complained about the heat and told me to put it out. That night we ate a rotisserie chicken I had picked up from Walmart, with some microwaved peas and carrots on the side. My dad ate about half of his dinner before withdrawing to the sticky living room couch. My mom pushed the vegetables to the side right away. I had forgotten that she hates peas. And carrots.
     That night I went to bed earlier than I had planned. The house was in shambles, because my parents never cleaned any of their messes up. I took one look at all the plates and glasses and spilled drinks on the carpet and blankets and pillows and jackets and frames all over across the floor, and I decided that it was a job for another day. But I knew it would never be completely cleaned up. There would always be broken glass in the corners and stains in the rug. But I knew it was all the same.
     Anyways.
     My parents drove home early the next morning. As soon as they were gone, I decided to end my break early and get back in the mail truck.
     It didn’t take long for me to fall back into the normal routine. I found that I had started to miss the Stewarts. I got to see the house every day again, which made the hours go by much faster. Their house seemed to drive away the storm clouds raging in my head. From then on, I made one thing clear to myself: The Stewarts were the best thing in my life.
     Sooner than I expected, Molly was in high school. Sometimes I saw her through a window, but rarely outside anymore. It was shocking how old she had gotten. Her face was spotty and red and she was getting very tall. Taller than her mother, at least. Her eyes were darker around the edges, the way they always are once girls get to that age. She looked so much stronger than she had ever been. I was proud of her, of course. But every time I thought back to her chalk drawings on the driveway, or when I caught a glimpse of the tire swing swaying idly in the breeze, I found that I wasn’t entirely satisfied. Something was missing. Something had ended.
     Around that time was when I first spotted the mortgage notices. I had seen letters that looked like them before in their mail pile. The only difference now was the giant, bolded red letters on the back that screamed the words “PAST DUE.” The grim red words ruined the tone of their happy yellow home. They made my spine tingle as if they were a death sentence. But I had to put them in the mailbox.
     Thankfully, the Stewarts were able to fend off those unwelcome letters. They continued to have their parties. Their lights were always on. Molly continued to receive report cards, and the rest of her family was never deprived of birthday wishes, holiday gifts or postcards. All was well. How could it not have been?
     Once, I remember realizing suddenly that it was June 17, and Mark’s birthday was in two days. When I stopped at the Stewart’s house, the mailbox was decorated with golden balloons bent into the shape of a five and a zero. I took the balloons as a hint, and when I got home, I wrote a letter to Mark. Even today, looking back on it, I’m surprised at the amount of courage I must have had. It was like writing to the president of the United States. I tried to keep it short, wishing him a happy birthday and congratulating him on making it through fifty years. I also briefly mentioned that I remembered the day they moved in, and that I thought he had a wonderful family. The next day, I slipped it into an envelope, wrote his name on the back and, without hesitation, added it to their mail pile and put the whole thing in the box.
     When June 19 arrived, I was eager to see how they would be celebrating the big day. When I arrived, there was a blockade of cars along the street, and there was music from inside the house. Again I had to leave the truck in order to get to the mailbox. Then, when I reached for the door of the box, I nearly dropped the mail when I saw a piece of paper taped to it.
I immediately tore it off and read it.

  Mailman,
  Thank you so much for all the kind words. They meant a lot to our family. We have loved living here, and have always appreciated your presence on the street. This neighborhood has been the perfect environment for our daughter Molly. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for us. I can only hope that you have enjoyed it as much as we have!

Sincerely,
Mark Stewart.

     I read it again, and a third time. When I lowered the note from my eyes and looked at the house, I saw three bodies waving to me in the kitchen window. Mark on the left, Amy on the right, and Molly in the middle. They all had big smiles on their faces, their backs to the party. I lifted an arm and softly waved back at them. The light from their window cast a pale yellow glow across my body, and finally they lowered their waves and fell back into the party.
     The way they were waving, it didn’t feel to me how it should have. I knew they were waving to be nice, to let me know that they meant what they said. But, for a reason I could never place, it seemed to me more like they were waving goodbye.
     When I arrived home that night, I went straight to the mantle above the fireplace and set Mark Stewart’s letter on top of it. I read it every day. Until the last day.
     That spring, Molly got accepted to college. She got a letter in the mail from the University of Connecticut that looked too promising to be a rejection. Over the summer, she rarely went outside, at least not when I stopped by. When I saw her through a window, which was almost never, I could tell she was all grown up. The last time I saw her was a Saturday, and it wasn’t much of a goodbye. She was sitting sideways on the sofa in the living room with her feet up on the cushions and a bowl in her lap. Since I didn’t know it would be the last time, I looked away quickly, because it reminded me of Christmas. I got in the truck and continued down the road, and even now I wish I hadn’t. When the leaves turned red, Molly’s bedroom light turned off and never came back on.
     I still saw the two people that remained, though. The dining room window was as big as ever, and normally I stopped by as they were in eating dinner. Seeing them cheered me up. They weren’t quite as young as they were when they moved in, with lighter hair and droopier faces. But that did not stop them from smiling and laughing with each other. For a while, it was almost like the old days, when Molly was with them, when they were still young and the future was still ahead.
     Then the storm hit. That was when I knew it was all over.
     It must have been the worst storm we’ve ever had. For a couple of days, the winds were high and the rain was so thick that I could barely see out the window. I took those days off, of course. When the storm was over, it was a relief to get back in the truck. But at the Stewarts’ house, I saw that they had encountered the worst of the storm. The tree beside their house had fallen over. The branches had all been broken, and the tire swing lay tangled in the grass like a forgotten yo-yo. Thankfully, the house looked fine, but then again I could only see it from one angle.
     The Stewarts quickly disposed of their dead tree and pretended it never happened. I did my job and kept delivering their mail. Soon, though, they received another notice about their mortgage. I had seen many of them before, so I ignored it. Until, a month later, another one came, and this time the red inky letters bled the words, “FINAL NOTICE.”
     Suddenly I found myself too scared to look closely at the mail they got. It seemed like every time I saw a birthday card or a postcard from far away, the visions would sit in my stomach like sour milk. They didn’t fill me with pride or happiness like they used to. And I dreaded seeing another letter with the ugly red stamp. Eventually, I stopped looking. I opened the mailbox, its shininess worn away by the weather, and gave them their mail.
     In my heart, I think I knew it was over. But I hung on to them for as long as I could. They hung on, too, but I could see that the paint on their house had started to peel. The lights sometimes flickered while they sat eating dinner. The roof desperately needed replacing, but I knew they couldn’t fix it.
     The storm was about two months ago. The foreclosure sign appeared yesterday.
     I had no reason to be surprised when I saw it, but that did not make it any less devastating. The first time I saw it, I almost drove straight into it and flattened it to the ground. The ugly white post was like a stake piercing through their entire life. It cast its pointy shadow into the bushes of flowers that Amy had worked so hard to grow. It blocked my view of the yellow that Mark had applied himself. It stood taller than the stump of the tree that used to hold up Molly’s childhood. The red letters echoed all the warnings they had gotten, the ones I had always tried to ignore. It was hard to put the mail in the mailbox, knowing that soon it would rust and no more letters would be leaving it. I searched through the dirty windows for any speck of light, but now there was nothing but darkness.
     I walked through my front door that night and hurled the keys to the truck into the trash can. All I could think to do was sink into the couch cushions and stare at the wall, until my eyes landed on Mark’s note on the mantle. Something burned inside me, and I ripped it from its perch and tore it in half, and into quarters and eighths. I watched the pieces flutter down to join the keys and everything else I no longer wanted. My stomach grumbled, but I went straight to bed. And even in bed, I couldn’t sleep, because my brain was booming with thoughts and emotions. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw myself back in the truck, the road rolling away beneath me, and I remembered how the whole path was one big circle that always brought me back to the exact same place.
     They have thirty days to pack up their things. I cannot imagine how much they’ll have to pack, everything that’s accumulated for the past twenty years or so. They will have to box up everything they ever gave their daughter. They will have to leave all those rooms to the dust and spiders. I’ll still pass their house every day, because it’s my job. The only difference is that their mailbox is closed now, for good. Or maybe it’s not a big difference. After all, the box, just like the house, has always been there, and always will be there. The only thing that comes and goes is the mail.
     And when they're gone, I’ll still be a mailman, stuck in the circle. Maybe one day, there will be another family. But I’m old now, and I know better than to think they’ll be any different.