Not on purpose, not with any grand intention — he’d have been embarrassed to hear it put that way.

But by befriending me, by showing me over a year of Saturdays that I was still a person capable of connection, that the reaching was survivable, that another human being could see the worst of me and stay, he did something to me that made Lorene possible.

I’d been treating my daughter as the one relationship too dangerous to risk, the one where the stakes were too high to bear a rejection, and so I’d kept her at the safe distance of ten bright minutes, protecting myself from the one person whose distance actually broke my heart.

It took practicing on Del — on the lower stakes of a new friendship — to relearn the muscle I’d need for her.

You cannot leap straight to the hardest reach; the courage has to be built somewhere it can afford to fail, and then spent where it matters.

Del was where I rebuilt my courage.