His laugh, the barn-door fastball, the bad singing, the crying at dog movies he’d deny to your face — all of it lived now in exactly one place, which was my memory, and if I did not hand it across to them, piece by piece, it would die with me and they’d grow up with a father who was only a face in an album.

So I made it a practice.

I told them Russ stories at dinner, at bedtime, in the truck.

I kept his memory loud on purpose, the way I keep the pantry full on purpose, because a child can go hungry for a father the same as for anything else, and I had the one thing that whole hidden closet could never touch — thirty-five years of knowing my brother — and I was going to spend all of it on his kids.

And once, Ollie asked me straight out, testing something, “Are you going to be our dad now?” And I told him the truth, which I had thought about carefully.