This may be my dad's best story. If I were his editor, helping him assemble a short story collection, I'd put it first. I suspect this story, which I probably first read when I was eighteen or nineteen, tremendously affected my sense of how to envision the way the human heart (to quote William Faulkner) conflicts with itself. 

Prison puts that conflict under a microscope my isolating the self from potentially diverting stimuli. It's no surprise, then that so many of the fathers I've created for novels have either been in prison or deserve to be there.