But there's always a Mass. It's not a formal Mass at all. We're sitting around her dining room table with wine and Eucharist and holding hands. It's very informal and small, but to me that's a wonderful way to have Mass.

I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.

We only used the dining room table about once or twice a year.

I remember her sitting at the dining room table with the bills. She had everything balanced to the penny. If she was two cents off, she kept trying to figure it out until she found it. She also kept buying all these insurance policies on myself and my sister. I still have one of them. We kept trying to explain to her that she should have insurance on herself.

Nothing, I learned, brings you into the present quite like holding hands. The past seemed irrelevant; the future, unnecessary.

Later, holding Milo’s hand in the dark, Jacob felt that it was only in recovering it that he learned what he had been in danger of losing. The touch of Milo’s hand seemed to remind him of parts of himself that he had already begun to forget about.