“She confessed some things to me. And they’re hard to hear.” She stretched her hand, beautiful in the morning sun washing the dining room with summer light through those big windows to their side. She grabbed his, like a sister, tenderness and memory and a desire to make the pain not come. And he nodded, trying to hide his hurt, but failing.

“She said she was sorry about one of them. Not the other. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

When Jesse had slowly, too slowly, told his friends and family about the autism diagnosis, only his father had had the reaction he did. No sympathetic sad face, no hug, no awkward question about what was next or veiled attempt to find out what kind of life Jesse and Janie and their boy could expect. Their boy. No, none of that. This mysterious man, this man Jesse barely knew, all muscle and sadness and loyalty down to the roots, he’d looked away from Jesse, reached down to the living room floor, picked his three-year-old grandson up and smiled at him and kissed his head and made tiger noises. And Jesse had decided then that even if he could never know his father, he could love him. Because that was what he’d wanted done for the boy who had his heart. His little boy.

“I thought at first that she was going over a bill or something. She had her head kind of resting on one of her hands. But she wasn’t. She was crying. She was crying harder than I’ve ever seen anybody cry, Randy.” And whether this was literally true or not, Randy got the point. “I didn’t know what to do, man. I still don’t know what to do.” And he sat there then, without eating or speaking, looking first at Randy then down at the floor.

“If being a Christian means anything,” Bo said, “it means helping somebody out of a mess he made.” And that was that. Randy looked down at the table, more than ever sure of who he wanted to become.

In the course of two hours, everything he thought the world and he himself had been had unspun and rewound in reverse. He had been filthy, selfish, and hungry in ways he’d never known or understood. Now the Author of his soul and body, the Author of every soul and body anywhere, had chosen to love him and forgive him. And on this one car ride there was simply no room in his head for bitterness or anxiety.

Their marriage had the slow form of cancer that could have been treated if either one had been willing to disrupt their lives just enough to demonstrate actual care for the other, but it turned out that having separate interests and separate careers and separate bank accounts meant no less than what the adjective “separate” means.

One of the marvelous things about the way God has made the world is that when our idols are taken away we are, at least for a moment, more ourselves.