After we eat, Sam hovers around the kitchen while I rinse the plates and stack the dishwasher. I take it as a good sign that he hasn’t immediately retreated to his room or gone into the living room to watch basketball on ESPN, but now my brain’s wishing it could quickly Google how to entertain motherless vegetarian ten-year-old.

“How about a movie?” I say. “I could make us popcorn…”

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

“There’s a ton of DVDs inside. See if there’s something there you like.”

Oliver’s a bit of a film addict, or used to be at least. When I met him we used to go to the movies at least once a week, although now it seems like a long time since we’ve done that. I know all couples say that kind of thing, but of course, most couples we know have an excuse these days: children.

When I join him a few minutes later, Sam’s poring over a handful of DVDs he’s pulled from the shelf.

“Lord of the Rings.” He holds them up for me to see. “Grandpa used to love these. He had all the books. Remember?”

He’s looking at me as if waiting for this to mean as much to me as it does to him, and I feel guilty that it doesn’t.

“He loved Lord of the Rings,” Sam says. “He used to call me Samwise. After the character in the books—Samwise, Frodo’s friend. You know.”

I guess I totally missed this hobby of Dad’s. I remember him as being an avid reader of the news and adventure memoirs, but I don’t remember him reading fantasy, or fiction at all really. Now I wonder what it was that spoke to him in these stories of Middle Earth and elves and dragons; were they books of his childhood, did they evoke old memories?

Dad’s childhood wasn’t a particularly happy one. He was the eldest, and his mother seems to have been a flighty sort of woman who then tragically died young. Dad spent a lot of time taking care of his younger siblings—three boys and a girl—but none of them stayed close. Mom says it was always a pretty dysfunctional family. One of the other brothers died quite young, and I guess the sister’s been estranged for decades. She sent flowers to Dad’s funeral—beautiful, extravagant ones—so I guess someone’s in touch with her, but I’ve never met her. The two other brothers live in Montana and Texas now, and they did make it to the funeral, but it was almost like meeting two strangers. I could count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen them, growing up. One of them has kids, not that I’ve ever met them. My Texan cousins that I couldn’t pick out of a line-up.