That is a thing I did not know I needed until I had it.

A friend is someone you can grieve in front of without being asked, however gently, to please be done soon.

Chapter 8 — The Long Winter

I want to be honest that it wasn’t all easy, because a friendship between two set-in-their-ways old men is not a frictionless thing, and we had a bad stretch that winter that nearly ended it.

It was a stupid thing, the way it always is.

We disagreed about something — money, if you can believe it, a few hundred dollars in parts for the truck and who owed what, and underneath the money was really pride, my discomfort at how much the Tillmans had folded me in, my need to not be the charity case, the lonely new man they’d taken pity on.