Del got the diagnosis in August.

His heart.

Not the worst kind of news, the doctors were clear about that — a bad valve, manageable, treatable, a surgery with good odds — but the word heart and the word surgery in the same sentence about a man you’ve come to love will stop your own cold.

I drove him to the appointments in the city, an hour each way, and Trudy sat between us in the cab of my car with her hands folded tight, and I understood on those drives how far I’d come from the man who’d arrived in Coldwater with a rented trailer and no one in the world — because I was not a spectator to this.

I was family now, the kind you become rather than the kind you’re born, and my presence in that car was assumed the way a place at the Wednesday table had come to be assumed.

In the waiting rooms Del was gruff and impatient and hated every minute of being a patient, and I razzed him about it the way you razz a friend to keep the fear at bay, and once, waiting for a test, he said to me, quiet, looking at the wall, “You’ll look after Trudy.