My daughter, Lily, has always been a quiet kid. Even as a baby, she hardly cried. She’d lie in her crib and watch the ceiling fan turn with an expression of total concentration, like she was working out a math problem, and when I came to pick her up, she’d reach for me with both arms without making a sound.

Her father used to say she was an old soul. “She’s been here before,” Sam would say, holding her up over his head in the kitchen while she studied his face. “She’s just checking to see if we’re doing it right this time.”

Sam died four years ago, when Lily was eleven. After that, my quiet kid got even quieter.

My name is Megan Porter. I’m forty-one years old, and I live in a small white house with green shutters on a gravel road outside Mountain Grove, Missouri, in the hills of the Ozarks. I drive a school bus for the Mountain Grove school district in the mornings and afternoons, and in between I clean rooms at the Super 8 out by the highway. It isn’t glamorous, but it keeps the lights on. Most months.

Sam was a lineman for the electric cooperative. He climbed poles in ice storms and tornadoes and hundred-degree heat to put the power back on for people he’d never meet. He had big, scarred hands and a laugh you could hear from the barn, and he sang Merle Haggard songs off-key while he washed the dishes.

He used to say one thing to Lily over and over, every time she asked him why he went out in storms to fix other people’s lights.

“Being a good person means helping when nobody’s watching, Lil,” he’d say. “Anybody can be good when they’re getting a medal for it.”