Look at this one.” I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked…complicated and hungry. She’d captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. “There I’m only myself,” she’d said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

What I know about you, Henry,” he said. “Is that you, as big as you are, know how to walk gently on this earth.

I couldn’t stop crying because it was so intimate, in that way I always thought being physical with him would feel. If someone had walked in they might have thought Henry was barely touching me. I knew the truth of it.He was laying me open and bare to him and to God.There wasn’t a more intimate act. I would never recover from this.

Camus and Henry waved to me from that muddy truck. They both wanted me to get over myself.So, this was me, getting over myself. And it was about time.