Del came home cranky and weak and a terrible patient, and I spent that fall doing for him what he’d spent the year before doing for me, which is to say I showed up, and I was useful, and I didn’t make a thing of it.

I mowed his lawn while he sat on the porch and criticized my lines.

I drove him to his cardiac rehab and sat in the waiting room and razzed him about the exercise bike.

I ran Trudy’s errands and cleaned the gutters — his and mine both, I’d learned my lesson — and I sat with him in the long dull afternoons of a recovery, watching ballgames, saying nothing, which is the highest form of male companionship there is.

And somewhere in that fall the friendship finished becoming what it was going to be, because I finally got to be the one who gave rather than only the one who received, and that mattered to me more than I can say.

For a year Del and Trudy had been folding me in, feeding me, saving me, and I’d carried the quiet shame of the taken-in man, the charity case, the lonely stranger they’d pitied.