"It's okay, Astrid," he said.
She melted into his arms.
"Don't you care?" she choked out. "Isn't it driving you crazy to think of what is going on out there?!"
He held her in his big football-player arms and she wept.
I was up on my feet. I had propelled myself to my feet and I started walking to the Home Improvement aisle, without even knowing where I was going.
Alex followed me.
I stormed off into the Pet aisle, kicking some fallen doggie treat boxes out of my way.
"Dean?" Alex asked. "Do you know what type Mom and Dad are, by chance?"
I shook my head.
"I'm sorry that I have B and you got O," he said.
"That's stupid," I said. "I'm glad you are type B. It's the least scary of them all."
"Sterility is definitely the best one," he replied. "Because it's highly unlikely that I would be a father, anyway. It's highly unlikely I would ever want to, even if I could, after all of this."
I looked at him. Sometimes the way his brain worked just amazed me. He could deal with anything, as long as he could look at it scientifically.
"Anyway, I just wanted to say I'm sorry you got the worst type."
And satisfied with our discussion, he walked away.
* * *
Alex, I will tell you, was just like our dad. Looked like him, thought like him, hiked up his pants the same way.
Our dad was an engineer and a land surveyor, employed almost exclusively by Richardson Hearth Homes. He loved his work but hated the developments he helped build. All the houses with their customizable elements—countertops, appliances, façade colors—he said they were for people who were mall-minded. It was a phrase of his. Similar to small-minded, but mall-minded.
Mall-minded people were people who'd grown up working at one national chain store to earn a paycheck they'd spend on crappy products and bad food from other national chain stores.
It was kind of revealing about my dad. He looked down on his neighbors, but built the very homes they lived in. A weird paradox. And we lived, always, in one of his developments. Apparently we couldn't afford not to—they gave my parents such a steep discount.
What my dad did love was the technical aspect of his work. Surveying, measuring, working with machines and computers—all that stuff he was great at.
Alex was like that, too. He thought in terms of numbers and figures and trends.
When he was a little kid he was scared of everything. Dogs, trucks, the dark, Halloween; you name it, he was scared of it.
Our dad had taught him to analyze the things he feared.
So going trick-or-treating with him, when he was little, was like listening to a technical debriefing:
"That's not a real witch, it's a plastic figurine with LED lights for eyes and a prerecorded screech track. Those are not real gravestones; they are PVC molded into the shape of tombstones, with creepy sayings on them that were written by a gag writer. Those are not real demons coming down the street, those are the high school kids dressed in costumes they got at Walgreens or possibly ordered online..."
And all the while Alex'd be squeezing my hand like it offered his last link to sanity.
I had liked being his protector—the one who made him feel safe. Which was why I felt even worse about having attacked him.
