I understood something, saying that, about what my actual job was going to be.

I am not a sentimental man; Russ and I came up in a family where feelings were things you had in private and did chores about in public.

But sitting there with my brother’s boy, watching him grieve a father he’d been too young to get enough of, I understood that I had become a kind of bridge — the last living span between these children and the man who made them.

Everything Ollie and Josie would ever know of their father that they could not remember themselves, they would have to get from me.