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later,” she heard him say.
    Mom’s eyes actually got smaller, which was saying something. “Well, I’m not.”
    Becky was amazed that she’d been able to forget what things were like in the house for even a minute. Now that she remembered she just wanted to get away from it. If they weren’t going to tell her what was going on, they couldn’t expect her to stick around in the middle of it.
    “I’m gonna go up to my room to read,” she said.
    Mom kissed her on the top of the head. “You go ahead, honey.”
    Becky slowly walked out of the kitchen and then picked up speed as she got into the hallway. When she got up to her room, she realized that her Ray Bradbury book was still in the den. There was no chance she was going down to get it, though. She’d already made her getaway. She got her Nintendo DS instead and started to play a game.
    She must have gotten really caught up in Dino Master, which was a surprise considering how she was feeling, because Dad made that throat-clearing sound he made when she’d zoned out and he was trying to get her attention. She looked up at him.
    “Okay if I come in?” he said.
    “Yeah, sure. What’s up?”
    He took a few steps into her room. “It’s after eleven.”
    “It is?” Becky looked over at the clock in her room. “Wow, I guess I was really concentrating on this game. I’ve gotten some cool fossils.”
    Dad gave a tiny chuckle. “Maybe there’s a career as an archeologist in your future. Listen, Mom’s going off to bed, and I’m running out of gas myself. I figured we might want to get to the story before I’m too useless to make any sense.”
    Becky looked down at her DS and turned off the machine. “Yeah. Let me go brush my teeth.”
    Dad came into the room and sat on the bed while Becky went into the hallway. As she did, Mom came up the stairs and kissed her goodnight, hugging her for way longer than usual. Whatever Mom meant by this, it just made Becky feel heavy. She wished she was back in the world of Dino Master, or that she was a cartoon character, like RJ from “Over the Hedge.” She wanted to be anything other than what she was – a kid whose parents didn’t seem to like each other anymore and were making her feel really uncomfortable about it.
    Becky brushed her teeth and combed out her hair and then went back to her room. Dad was sitting with his back against the wall as he always did. She climbed onto the bed next to him and allowed him to pull her closer, though she kind of felt like being alone. Superpremium and “Bohemian Rhapsody” seemed like they had happened a few months ago.
    “Thanks for the fun night tonight, babe,” he said, as he squeezed her shoulder.
    “Yeah, it was fun,” she said with as much enthusiasm as she could manage. It had been a fun night, hadn’t it? It just didn’t last. How much better would things have been if she’d just gone straight up to her room when they got home?
    “So the motorcade was getting ready to leave, right?”
    Dad obviously wasn’t going to say anything about his little exchange with Mom in the kitchen. Why would she have possibly expected him to do that when he hadn’t said anything about anything else? He just wanted to get into the Tamarisk story like they did every night at bedtime. Into fantasyland. Becky sometimes wondered if he wished he could go there rather than being here with her. Maybe he’d actually talk to his daughter if she were the princess of a kingdom rather than some ten-year-old from Connecticut. Maybe that was what was really going on here. Maybe Dad didn’t think she was worthy of talking to because she wasn’t of royal blood ’.
    “Yeah, the motorcade was getting ready to leave,” she said half-heartedly.
    “Tell it, babe.”
    Becky didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and then she started the story the way she always did before beginning tonight’s episode.
    “When they walked outside, the sky was filled with dark clouds, and it felt like it does