Caleb’s became dry and red and rough, the knuckles chapped, the skin cracked from hours in scalding dishwater, and when I took them in mine on Sunday mornings and rubbed lotion into them, he would let me, quietly, the way he let me do very few things anymore.

He was working, I could see, genuinely hard, harder than I had expected a Saturday dish job to demand, and I was proud of him for it, and I told him so.

Whenever I asked how the bike fund was coming along, he always gave me the exact same two words, delivered with a small confident smile.

“Almost there,” he would say.

Almost there.