Petrosky — and when I said she’d passed he just nodded and said “that’s a hard row,” and didn’t flinch or fumble or change the subject the way city people do, and I felt something in my chest unclench that had been clenched for four years.

He didn’t try to fix my grief.

He just sat with it a minute, like it was a fact about the weather, and then asked if I’d gotten my gutters cleaned before winter, because I hadn’t, and I didn’t even know I needed to.

I have thought since about that instinct of his, to meet a man’s grief with a practical question about gutters, and how a certain kind of person would find it callous — would want Del to have said something feeling, something about loss, to have honored the moment.

But those people are wrong, and it took me a while to understand why Del was right.

He was not changing the subject away from my grief.