Now I got to pay it back, not that anyone was counting — you don’t count, in a real friendship, that’s the whole point — but I needed, for my own soul, to be needed, to be the strong one for once, to prove to myself that I wasn’t just a hole that other people’s kindness poured into but a man with something to give.

Del let me give it, which was its own kind of gift, because a proud man letting you help him is the truest thanks there is.

Chapter 14 — The Bench

That next spring, a year and a half after I’d come to town, Del and I built a bench.

It was his idea.

He’d gotten it into his head that the little league field, where his grandkids played, needed a proper bench behind the backstop for the grandparents to sit on, and he wasn’t going to wait for the town to do it, so we did it — bought the lumber at Coldwater Hardware, in the same store where we’d met over a toilet flapper, and built the thing over a couple of Saturdays in his garage, and set it in concrete behind the backstop ourselves.