I have thanked God more than once for Trudy Tillman.

Del and I would have lost each other.

We’d have been two more old men three streets apart, nursing a grievance neither could remember the shape of, and we’d have called it principle, and it would have been a tragedy, and no one would ever have known it happened, including us.

Chapter 9 — Lorene

My daughter Lorene called every couple of weeks, dutiful calls, and I had gotten as good at them as I’d gotten at everything else that spring — which is to say I’d stopped being able to hide from Del how thin they were.

He caught it, of course.