When he finally left, promising to come Thursday, the shop was quieter than it had been, and for the first time in four months the quiet did not feel like a held breath.

It felt like a room a person had just been in.

I had spent the autumn avoiding people because every one of them wanted to give me their sympathy, which is a weight, and here at last was a person who wanted to give me a task, which is a gift, and I have thought since that this is the truest help you can offer the grieving — not to lighten their load but to hand them a good one, something to carry that is worth the carrying, something with somebody else’s need in it.

Yusuf handed me the street.