He missed it twice while I was sitting there with a screwdriver in a hinge.

And the third time he stopped, and made a noise of pure eight-year-old frustration, and said:

“Dad, how does this part go?”

And everything on that step stopped.

He knew.

I watched him hear himself, about a half-second after it was out, and I watched his face start to do something complicated, and I had about one second to decide what kind of man I was going to be for the rest of my life as a father.

I did not grab him.

I did not say anything about it.

I did not let my voice do the thing it very much wanted to do.

Because if I had made it a moment, it would have become a thing he had done for me, and the next time he would have had to decide whether to do it again, and a nine-year-old should not be making decisions about how to manage his father.