Dr. Sandhu had explained it to him in February with a plastic model of an eyeball that came apart in halves, like an Easter egg. The macula, she had said, tapping a yellow spot at the back. This is the part you read with. This is the part you see faces with. Yours is wearing out. The left one faster than the right. We can slow the left one down with injections, and we will, but I want you to understand what we're slowing.
He had understood. He had been a letter carrier for thirty-eight years; he understood about things that wore out slowly and then all at once. He had taken the injections every six weeks since March, a needle in the white of his eye while he looked at a sticker of a sunflower on the ceiling, and the left eye had held, more or less, and the right had gone on doing what it was doing anyway. In August Dr. Sandhu had held up a card in the exam room and asked him to read the third line, and he had read it wrong, and she had put the card down and looked at him with her kind, tired face and said, "Mr. Johnson, I'm not the state. I can't take your license. But I'm asking you."
"How long have I got?"
"To drive? You should have stopped already. I'm asking you to stop by the first of the year."
"I'll stop the first of November," he had said, because if he was going to do a thing he preferred to pick the day himself. "Give me till then."
She had given it to him. And he had gone home and sat Imogene down at this same table and told her, and Imogene had cried, which she did not do often, and then she had wiped her face with a dish towel and said, very quietly, "Well. Then I suppose I'd better learn."
They had both known what that meant. Imogene Ruth Tuggle had grown up on a tobacco farm out past Philpot, the youngest of seven, and her father had held that a girl who learned to drive was a girl who would drive away, and so none of his daughters had. Her brothers had driven her to school and to church and, at nineteen, to the Daviess County courthouse to marry a skinny boy from Owensboro who had just been hired on at the post office. After that Arvel had driven her. For fifty-two years he had driven her to the hospital laundry where she worked the early shift, and to her sister's in Lewisport, and to the Kroger on Thursday and church on Sunday and the doctor whenever the doctor was needed. It had never