Ennis gave the truck door a good slam to make sure it stayed closed and unlocked his trailer. It hadn't been an easy thing for him to go Lightnin' Flat, but he felt he owed it to Jack. So many things he could have done while Jack was alive, but he hadn't, that was the hell of it. Now, now that Jack was a pile of ash and polished chips of bone, only now, did Ennis Del Mar stir himself to do the right thing by his friend. Only to fail again, thwarted this time by Jack's sour stick of an old man. Sitting at that plain table in that cold kitchen, listening to the old cock of the walk release his venom in dribs and drabs, Ennis had thought the trip a wasted one. Only the pleasure of meeting Jack's mama had sweetened the bitter pill that stuck in Ennis's throat.

But it hadn't been a complete waste after all. He had been invited to look into Jack's boyhood bedroom. He had been given a chance to sit quietly in a space that his irrepressible friend had once filled with childish dreams of running off to join the rodeo. He had been privileged to touch the small things that had been Jack's treasures. And in that room, in an even smaller space, he had been given proof, had found the truth, he had seen the light. In his moment of discovery, he knew… and that knowing pierced him like a spear in his side.

Ennis had gone back downstairs and listened to Jack's old man pronounce final judgment on the son he had never known, but Ennis did not even feel the last cut. Jack was gone; what did it matter what happened to what was left, now that the bright spirit had departed? What Ennis had learned upstairs had left him cloven in two. Half his heart swelled with joy that he was loved so deeply, and the other half shrank from the reality that this great love was gone now beyond his recall. If only he had not been so scared, so scarred, so blind, maybe… but it was too late, at least in the world, and this world, chilly and bleached of color, was all Ennis had now; his sun was forever eclipsed.

Head bowed, Ennis's eye fell on the ordinary brown paper bag on the chipped Formica of his counter. He unrolled the top of the sack into which Mrs. Twist had so carefully placed what she had sent him up to find. There was no mistaking the message in her big eyes, so much like Jack's he could hardly stand to look at her. She knew. She knew what had been between Ennis and her boy. And she did not hate Ennis. There was no disgust in her face, only sympathy, a sadness as deep as his and a glimmer of gratitude that Jack had not always been alone. By that fragile glow, Ennis saw that he must have made Jack happy from time to time and that surely was a ray of comfort in the smothering dark of his bereavement.

Ennis lifted the bundle from the bag as though it were a sleeping child and held it to his chest. With his eyes closed against the scalding tears that were never far away since that phone call to Texas, he turned blindly to his narrow closet. Gently, Ennis rearranged the shirts, putting his on the outside so that he might somehow protect Jack, as he'd not been able to do in life. Reaching into the closet, he pulled out the blue parka, fingers sliding over the silky down filled shell. Jack had rolled it up in Ennis's sleeping bag without noticing, and somehow Ennis had never got around to returning it. Placing it reverently on a hook, he hung the shirts in front of it and stepped back.

"Jack, I swear…" he began, and gave a little shake of his head. "Guess we both had our keepsake, didn't we, friend?"

Jack didn't answer then, but in Ennis's dreams that night, and most nights after, he said plenty. And the things he said, Ennis took to heart. Little by little, with Jack's night visits to warm him, Ennis thawed enough to see that there were still those in his life that loved him deeply, and he did his best to love them back. His girls and his grandkids started joking about his refusal to let anyone leave without a hug and a whispered, "I love ya, li'l darlin'."

For as Jack had taught him, he could not know when he would see them again.