He showed up for a year of Saturdays over a truck neither of us needed.

And I, learning from him, learned to show up back — at the hospital, at the rehab, at the lawn that needed mowing.

That’s what the plaque meant, the plaque he made without telling me, the plaque that wouldn’t say anything soft.

It said the softest thing there is, in the only dialect either of us could speak: that love, the real kind, the kind that saves a man’s life, is not mostly a feeling at all.

It’s a practice.

It’s an attendance record.