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having to leave her job whenever the Army moved me on. When I took the West Point job after Mogadishu, it wasn’t just the guarantee of my personal safety that made her so happy. At last she had stability in her life. Her own home, and her first steady job since our marriage.
    She started in the lab at Geometrics and worked her way up. It was a small company back then, developing new techniques to evaluate rock samples for the mining industry. When Geometrics boomed, more promotions followed. After five years Fiona was their head geochemist, managing the main lab and overseeing their international facilities. Quite an achievement for any woman; for one like Fiona, written off by her family when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen, simply amazing.
    Now she made a note in her diary, then came over to the percolator. Dropping some bread in the toaster, I drummed my fingers lightly on the bench. I asked if Brad had been down.
    “Haven’t seen him,” she said, and she gave my drumming fingers a do-you-mind kind of look. I decided I was not prepared, at a quarter of eight in the morning, to face yet another outbreak of low-level hostilities. I beat a retreat down the hall and opened the side door to the garage.
    “Brad!” I hollered. Our son Bradley had been holed up in semi-independent quarters above the garage since the age of sixteen. We built the conversion for Fiona’s widowed mother, Charlotte, but when Charlotte made the only spontaneous decision of her life and hitched up with a widower from Denver and married him—all this a month before she was due to move in with us—Brad hauled his desk into the conversion and claimed it as his own. A place to study, he told us. Before long the rest of his junk was making the short migration across the house, concluding some weeks later with the grand finale, the dismantlement and disappearance into the conversion of his bed. Seven years later, a high school diploma and a college degree behind him, he was showing no sign of moving on. Now he was working on his doctorate, an inquiry into the meaning of lumps of Mesolithic rock discovered in a layer of Precambrian. “Brad!” I hollered again, but there was no answer, so I climbed up and rapped on his door. “Eggs and ham. You want some?”
    When he called me inside I found him sitting at his desk, freshly showered, wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs. He was tapping away at the keyboard of his PC.
    “You want to leave that alone for five minutes, come and have some breakfast?”
    “Has Mom left?” he asked without turning.
    His mother, I told him, was still down in the kitchen.
    I glanced around. He had more books stacked along one wall than I’d read in my entire life, and more again on the shelves. A couple of trophies up there too, from college baseball.
    I nodded to the PC. “You don’t get enough of that nine to five?”
    “Tell Mom to wait, can you?” He scratched the stubble on his jaw, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I’ll be down in two secs.”
    I could have asked him what he had to say to his mother that he couldn’t say to me, but what, finally, would be the point? The emotional parameters of our family had been firmly entrenched for years, the special bond that existed between Brad and Fiona was one I’d long ago accepted as exclusive. It was more than just the mother-and-son thing. Physically he resembled me, tall and lean, but Brad and his mother were intellectual kin. It was no surprise to anyone when he decided to major in geology at college, by then he’d been involved in an informal private seminar with his mother on the subject for years. She never forced it on him. It started way back on our family camping trips. He gradually lost interest in fishing with me and took to wandering off fossicking with Fiona, armed with a hammer and a sample bag. If I thought about it at all, I guess I thought that most kids have phases, that in time he’d come back to me, we’d do our things