It had roared to life in his garage in July, that ’72 Ford, after a year of Saturdays, and we’d driven it around the county with the windows down like a couple of teenagers, both of us grinning like fools, and it had felt like the completion of something bigger than an engine.

And now I sat in a hospital praying for the man I’d rebuilt it with, and I thought about how I’d come to Coldwater expecting nothing, expecting to see out my days in a quiet self-sufficient solitude, a man who’d decided the friendship-making part of his life was over.

And instead I’d walked into a plumbing aisle and out into a whole second family, a best friend at sixty-two, a table that set a place for me, a daughter I’d found my way back to.

The surgeon came out at hour six with his mask pulled down and he was smiling before he reached us, and he said it had gone well, better than well, that Del was strong as an ox and would be home in a few days and good as new in a few months, and Trudy sat down hard in the plastic chair and wept, and I put my hand on her shoulder, and one of the Tillman kids put a hand on mine, and we were a chain of people holding onto each other in a hospital hallway, and I was one of the links, and I had not been a link in anything in a very long time.

I keep coming back to that image, the chain of us in the hallway, because it was the moment I understood the whole size of what had happened to me in Coldwater.

Two years earlier I had sat in a different hospital, alone, at the end of Carol’s life, and there had been no chain — just me, one man, one link connected to nothing on either side, holding on to no one and held by no one, the loneliest a person can be.