The smile goes across his whole face and crinkles up, but it’s why he gives me the smile he does that gets me, it’s how happy he is to have made me okay for a second. I can see in him this expanding need to make things better for me, to pluck me out of all the bad in my life. I saw a fleck of it in him that day with my father but here it is now, flowering into some kind of fullness, growing past a preference into a necessity.
