And then Lorene, my daughter, started to cry, and she said, “Dad, I thought you didn’t need me.

I thought you were fine.

You always seemed so fine, and I felt like an idiot for missing Mom so much when you seemed like you’d just — handled it.” And it turned out we’d done the same thing to each other that grieving people always do, each performing okayness to protect the other, each reading the other’s performance as distance, two people who loved each other marooned on separate islands of a grief we could have shared the whole time.

We talked for two hours.

It was the longest and truest conversation I’d had with my daughter in a decade, and I would not have made the call — I want to be honest about this — if a stubborn man in a feed cap hadn’t looked at me over a slice of pie and told me I was spending my courage in the wrong place.

That was the strangest gift of the whole friendship, and the one I’d never have predicted: that Del gave me back my daughter.