My wife, Hazel, had spent twenty-nine years building the young man standing at that door.

When Garnet struggled in school, she found the tutors and paid for them out of money we did not really have.

When his first business collapsed, she worked double shifts without a word of complaint to keep him afloat.

When he wanted to try again, she was the one who pushed me to mortgage the lake house — the one thing she had ever asked to keep for herself — so that he would have his second chance.

She had poured herself into that boy without limit and without ledger, the way mothers do, and for most of his life he had loved her back the way sons do, carelessly but truly.