I told Del about Carol in the spring, under the truck, both of us on our backs on the creeper boards staring up at the transmission, which is the correct position for a man to finally say the hard thing.

I hadn’t spoken her name aloud to another person in longer than I could remember.

In the city, at the end, people had gotten tired of my grief — there’s a statute of limitations on it, they think, an expiration date after which you’re supposed to be “moving on,” and I had learned to stop mentioning her rather than watch people’s faces do the polite thing.

But under Del’s truck, in the dark, with a wrench in my hand and no one looking at me, it came out.

How we’d met.

How she’d been the funny one, the warm one, the one who made us a life.