I met Del Tillman at the hardware store, over a disagreement about a toilet flapper, which is not how the movies would do it but is how it actually happened.

I was standing in the plumbing aisle of Coldwater Hardware holding two flappers and no idea which one my ancient toilet took, and a big weathered man about my age in a feed cap looked over and said, “That’s the wrong one.” Just like that.

Not unkindly.

He came over, took both flappers out of my hand, put one back on the shelf, and said, “You’ve got the old Mansfield, the house on Buckthorn, am I right?

The Petrosky place, they’re still calling it, though I guess it’s your place now.” I said it was, startled that he knew, and he said, “Small town, friend.

You’re the new fella.

You take the two-inch, not the three, and you’re going to need a new chain too, the old ones go brittle.” He handed me the right parts and the chain, and then, because I clearly looked as lost as I felt, he said, “You want, I’ll come by and show you.

Takes ten minutes if you know what you’re doing and about two hours if you don’t, and no offense, but you don’t.” And that was Del.

That was the whole man, right there in the plumbing aisle: gruff, certain, and already, before he knew a single thing about me, halfway to helping.

Chapter 3 — Del

Del came by that Saturday, fixed my toilet in the promised ten minutes, and then stayed four hours, and neither of us has ever been entirely sure how that happened.

He had lived in Coldwater his whole life, all sixty-four years of it, in the same three-mile radius, and he knew everything and everyone — whose grandfather had built which barn, which road flooded in spring, why the Methodists and the Lutherans hadn’t spoken since 1987.

He’d run the grain elevator until he retired, had a wife named Trudy he’d married at twenty and clearly still liked, three grown kids and a passel of grandkids, and a life so rooted in that one patch of ground that he seemed to me, at first, like a species of person I’d stopped believing existed — a man entirely at home in his own place, unhurried, unhaunted, sure of where he stood.

We drank coffee at my kitchen table that first Saturday and he asked me the plain questions a man asks — where I’d come from, what I’d done, was there a Mrs.