When you make a friend at twenty you’re not counting; when you make one at sixty-two you’re counting from the first day, and the counting doesn’t diminish the thing, it concentrates it, the way the shortest days of the year hold the most beautiful light.

So when the doctor said heart and surgery, what I felt was not the abstract worry of a younger man.

It was the specific, arithmetic terror of a man who had found, against all odds and very late, the friend of his life, and had already been quietly aware every single day that he would not get to keep him nearly long enough.

Chapter 12 — The Waiting Room

The surgery was in September, and I sat in the waiting room with Trudy and the three Tillman kids for six hours, and somewhere in the fourth hour I realized I was praying, which I had not done since Carol, and had not expected to do again.

We’d finished the truck by then, Del and I.