I understood, eventually, that Trudy had done it on purpose — that the feeding was not incidental but strategic, a campaign, that this small sharp woman had looked at the lonely widower her husband kept dragging in from the garage and had decided to fix me the way Del was fixing the truck, patiently, over months, with the one tool she trusted most, which was a full plate.

Because Trudy knew something about men that men mostly don’t know about themselves: that we will not accept care if you offer it as care.

Offer a man like me sympathy, a shoulder, an invitation to talk about your feelings, and I’ll be out the door and back in my empty house before you finish the sentence.

But offer him a chair at a table and a plate of pot roast and the plain matter-of-fact assumption that of course he’ll stay, no big deal, there’s plenty — and he’ll sit, and he’ll eat, and he’ll come back, and he’ll be nourished in ways that have nothing to do with the food, and never once have to admit that he needed it.

That was Trudy’s genius.

She loved me back to life without ever once making me feel like a project, fed the loneliness out of me one Wednesday supper at a time while letting me believe I was just being neighborly.