We figured out the college. It was not as hard as she feared, which is how it usually goes once somebody stands beside you instead of watching you drown politely from the shore. There was money from Ruth’s and my old life, more than I needed for a truck and cold coffee, and I could not think of a better monument to a woman who wanted children and never got them than to spend it launching one good soul into her life. Grace fought me on it at first. She did not want charity, she said, she wanted to earn her own way, and I respected that so much that I nearly gave in. But I told her the thing I had come to understand, which is that letting somebody help you is not weakness, it is a gift you give them, because the helping is what heals the helper. I told her she would be doing me the favor. It took her a while to believe me. She believed me eventually. The paying of that tuition did more for my grief than three years of driving ever did.
She started school that fall. I bought a little house in that town, a real one, with a real kitchen and a room she could stay in on weekends and over the summers, and I planted a garden in the back the way Ruth used to keep one, and I got a couple of hens because Carol said a man rattling around a house alone needs something to feed in the mornings. I stopped being a man passing through. I became a man who lived somewhere. I got a truck for hauling instead of for running, and I did odd jobs and repairs around town because it turned out my hands still knew how to be useful to people, and the town let me be useful, which is its own kind of belonging.