That night, I heard a commotion at the front door. Julie, my best friend, had been traveling when Stefan first came home. She was often traveling for an international dental outreach she sponsored, while her husband, Hal, manned the home front for their boys, who were eight and twelve. So I hadn’t seen her more than in passing. Now she had arrived in full benefactress mode, bustling through the door with packages and bags. Presents were her delight, and she wouldn’t let you feel guilty. Until last year, Julie had merely been wealthy. Trained as a dentist, she had worked for her father, who’d invented some widget that caused what Julie called “an orthodontic revolution.” That still made me laugh, picturing legions of white-coated marchers, all carrying flags emblazoned with retainers. After her father retired, she and her older brothers helped him sell his business for what she called, in her way, a “silly amount” of money. Even more would come when he died. There were times when I was struggling trying to rob from the lawyer’s bill to pay the electric bill, when I knew that if I asked Julie, she would pay both, then buy me a Max Mara silk-and-cashmere coat, on top of that. When I admired just such a new coat a few years back, she took it off and gave it to me.

So I never asked.

“Hey Jujubees,” Stefan said. It was his nickname for his honorary aunt. “My mom wants to trek on a camel across the Sahara Desert. Can you take her? She was thinking a couple of months, maybe. She needs a break from me and, oh boy, do I ever need a break from her.”

“You’ve been home for like, ten minutes. What, did you hit the ground hard?”

“What you think is the end is really the beginning.”

“That’s deep, man,” Julie said.

“I know, man.”

“I think you need to seek solace in nature, Stefan,” Julie said. Nature was Julie’s prescription for everything short of an arterial stent, and she was full of suggestions. She could give Stefan the keys to her family’s cabin. (Her “cabin” was a ten-bedroom flagstone pile in Door County with four cub cabins on the same woodland site, where all of us had stayed many times.) Or he could go to Mendota County Park and find a soldierly stand of trees that, even in the leafless deeps of winter, would shelter him.