They named him Jax Jesse Lamott, Jesse after Amy’s beloved grandmother Jessie, and Jax because they liked the way it sounded. Amy was twenty when she delivered, and Sam was nineteen. They’re both a little young, but who asked me? Sam’s birth, on August 29, 1989, was by far the most important day of my life, and Jax’s was the second. Sam and I are quite close, and I’d always looked forward with enthusiasm to becoming a grandmother someday, in, say, ten years from now, perhaps after he had graduated from the art academy he attends in San Francisco and settled down into a career, and when I was old enough to be a grandmother. I was a young fifty-five. Maybe a medium fifty-five. Let’s say a ripe fifty-five, with a child just one year past his majority. The day before Thanksgiving 2008, I had heard that Amy was expecting, when I got a call from Sam, in despair. “Mom, I’m going to be a father,” he said. I was silent for a time. “Oh, Sam,” I said finally. He and Amy had been together, tumultuously, since his birthday a year earlier, but they had split up a couple of months before—although not, I can see now, in the biblical sense.
What do You think about Some Assembly Required (2012)?
