who’d pulled on rubber gloves in disgust spent the following months learning her father’s face again, feeding him, walking with him, reintroducing him to a world that had moved twenty years past him. I did it with a devotion that was partly love and partly penance, because I could not forgive myself, for a long time, for the hour I’d spoken to him with such contempt before I knew.
He forgave me instantly, of course. That’s who he was, who he’d always been — the gentle, cultured voice that had unsettled me in the foyer was my father’s voice, the voice of a kind man that even twenty years of the streets hadn’t hardened.
“You didn’t know, Gracie,” he told me, when I apologized through tears for the hundredth time. “How could you know? And besides — you’re the one who found me. You bathed away twenty years of grime and found
