That’s us.” And we went and got pie.

I’ve kept that phrase, the show-up fellas, the way you keep a thing somebody gives you that turns out to be worth more than they knew.

Because it names the entire secret, the whole of what Del taught me without ever once meaning to teach anything.

Everything I’d believed love required — the grand gesture, the eloquent feeling, the words said out loud — Del had none of it, would have been mortified by all of it, and loved more truly than any eloquent man I ever knew, and he did it by the one method a man like him trusts, which is showing up.

He showed up in the plumbing aisle.

He showed up at my toilet, and stayed four hours.