My father was a changed man that summer, not magically, not all at once, but visibly, as though a weight he had carried for a decade had been lifted off his chest and he was learning, slowly, how to stand up straight again without it.

Every afternoon he would take Grace out to the back porch, and I would watch through the kitchen window as he taught her the things he knew, how to sand a piece of wood smooth, how to build a birdhouse, how to cast a fishing line into the creek that ran behind the property.

He was teaching her, I came to understand, all the small ordinary things he had never once gotten the chance to teach me, and she was giving him, without knowing it, a chance to be the man he had wanted to be all along.

There is a particular grace, I think, in the way children can offer redemption without meaning to and without demanding anything in return.