I tell her about Coldwater.

I tell her about Del and Trudy and the Wednesday table and the bench behind the backstop and the pie at Marge’s.

I tell her about Lorene, who comes to visit now, twice a year, real visits, and who met Del last summer and said afterward, “Dad, he’s good for you, I’ve never seen you like this,” and I said I knew.

And I tell Carol the thing I most want her to know, which is that I’m all right.

That the man she left behind, the one she must have worried about at the end, the one who didn’t know how to be a person without her — that man found his way to a small town and a stubborn friend and a whole life he never saw coming.

She’d be glad, I think.