What I was doing, and I could not see it for weeks, was looking for a way to be aggrieved.

Because a man who has discovered that his mother stole eight years is a man with a straightforward grievance, and a grievance is comfortable, and Denny Sorrels was a place to put some.

Here is what Denny Sorrels had actually done in two and a half years.

He taught my son four chords on a guitar, which is exactly as many as I know, and which is why my son could play the thing I wrote in the first place.

He drove Beto to an urgent care at eleven at night in 2020 with a suspected broken wrist, and sat in a waiting room for two hours, and came back the next day with a marker to draw on the cast.

He put in a window unit in Beto’s room in a July when the apartment’s system could not keep up, at his own cost, and took it out again in October and stored it in his own garage for the winter, and did that three years running.

And when I appeared — a man with forty trucks and a legitimate claim and, from his point of view, no warning whatsoever — Denny Sorrels did not say one word against me to Beto, ever, and I know that because Beto is seven and would have repeated it.

He and I had a conversation in the April, in a parking lot, which he initiated.

He said: “I’m going to say one thing and then I’ll leave it alone.

“I’m not his dad and I’ve never once tried to be.