I want to be plain about it, because there’s a man reading this who’s on it too, sure he’s fine, sure he doesn’t need anybody, proud of how little he asks of the world.

I was you.

I had it all worked out, how to see out my days with dignity and solitude.

And it was a slow death dressed up as independence, and I’d have finished it out and called it a life.

And instead I put a pin in a map and drove to Coldwater and walked into a plumbing aisle, and a man in a feed cap told me I had the wrong flapper, and offered to come show me the right way, and I said yes.

That yes was the whole thing.