And then she looked at me, thoughtful in the way she gets, so much like my father.

“Dad said you used to do so many things for us that he never even noticed,” she said.

I smoothed her hair back.

“Well,” I said.

“Now he knows.” It was not revenge.

I want to be clear about that; I felt no triumph in Gavin’s struggle with the socks.

But there was a justice in it, a plain and useful justice — that the labor I had done for a decade, invisibly, uncounted, was finally being counted, one burned egg at a time, by the man who had once asked me with a straight face what I even did all day.

And I noticed something else in the weeks that followed, something I had not planned and would not have thought to ask for: as Gavin began, clumsily, to do the work himself, his contempt for it quietly died.