He learned Wes needed to be trusted with responsibility, and Abe needed to be left alone until he chose to come near, and Delphie needed to be gotten down on the floor with.

He never once tried to be their father, which is precisely why they have come, on their own and in their own time, to love him like one.

And I think of Rhett sometimes, when I watch Judd out on the dock with Ira’s head tipped back at the stars — Rhett, who wanted to buy his way into a decade in an afternoon, who thought fatherhood was a thing you claimed rather than a thing you did, ten thousand small unglamorous times, on the days it is boring and the days it is hard.

The difference between the two men is the whole of what I have tried to teach my children about love.