“There is?” He looks nonplussed.

“Way more than you get.”

Sam grimaces.

“Your grandpa encouraged me to become a teacher, you know,” I say.

Dad always thought teaching was a wonderful profession. He fully understood that the real job was teaching students how to think, not just ramming their heads full of facts. God bless curiosity, he’d say—most of the time sincerely, but some of the time jokingly, like when we’d see nosy Mrs. Harding’s curtains twitching as we drove by.

“Curiosity is being skeptical of the right things,” he told me once. “It means being skeptical of ideas, but not of people. Someone tells you to swallow an idea whole, you just have a think about where that idea comes from. But spend your life being skeptical of people?” He shook his head. “That’s a quick way to corrode the soul.”

Dad loved people: even the people he didn’t like, he kind of loved. Even Mrs. Harding and her twitching curtains.

“What about you, Sam?” I say. I feel like I’m treading cautiously. We haven’t talked much about Sam’s “real” life, back home in Westchester. I’m afraid that asking him too much about it will just rub salt in the wound.

“What do you mean, what about me?” He glances back out the window.

“Well, what would you like to do for a job one day?” I avoid using the term when you grow up, because the older I get the less that term makes sense to me.

“Um.” Sam looks at me. “Promise you won’t laugh?”

“I would never.”

He fiddles with his hoodie strings again. “I think I’d like to be an astronaut. I mean,” he goes on, “I know it’s really hard and there’s lots of training. But it would be so awesome, seeing the earth from super far away. Seeing everything.” He pauses. “Plus you get all those special meals. And astronaut ice cream.”

“It would be pretty spectacular,” I concede. “Wouldn’t it be a little lonely, though?”

Sam considers it. “I don’t think so. I don’t feel lonely in Nature, and Space is like Nature, just bigger.”

I smile, turning that one over as I pull up into Mom’s driveway. “I guess it is, Samwise.”

He looks at me, surprised.

“Your grandpa was right.” I shrug. “It’s a good name for you.”

Mom gives Sam a hero’s welcome, and leads us into the kitchen. She’s left her novel planted wide open on the table to keep the page—it’s a sign of her enthusiasm to see her grandson that she didn’t even take the extra second to use a bookmark, because Mom always says she can’t abide a cracked spine.

“I was thinking,” she says, “we should all do something for New Year’s, since Sam’s here this year. What do you think?”