She called me on a Thursday and said, “Walter Petrosky, your supper’s getting cold and my husband’s too stubborn to dial a phone, so I’m dialing it.

Get over here.” And I went.

And Del handed me a wrench without a word, and that was the apology, both of ours, and we never spoke of it again.

But I think about those three weeks more than I think about almost anything else in the whole story, because of how close it came, and how small the thing was that nearly did it.

A few hundred dollars.

A sharp word.