Our friends were really her friends, and when she died they drifted off with a casserole and a card, not out of unkindness but because the thread that had connected me to them had been her, and the thread was cut.

And I had not replaced any of it, because men my age don’t, because somewhere along the line we absorb the lesson that a grown man doesn’t need people, that self-sufficiency is the whole of dignity, that to reach out is to admit a lack.

So we don’t reach.

We sit in our houses, we men, tens of thousands of us, widowed or divorced or just quietly alone, each of us certain that friendship is a thing that happens to other people and younger people, each of us too proud to be the one who calls first.

I had been doing exactly that in Coldwater for six weeks — sitting in my big empty house being self-sufficient — and I would have gone on doing it for years, I think, if a gruff man in a feed cap had not looked at my hands in a plumbing aisle and decided, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that I was worth two hours of a Saturday.

I have thought a great deal, since, about why it fell to Del to reach first — why it is nearly always the Dels of the world who have to, the men who somehow never got the crippling lesson the rest of us got.