She snorted, but her face softened. "Fucking Chutsky. Thinks he's too old and beat-up and useless for a nice young thing like me. Keeps saying I can do better. And when I say maybe I don't want to do better, he just shakes his head and looks sorrowful."

It was all very interesting, a truly riveting look into the life of someone who had been a human being much longer than I had, but I was all out of ideas for constructive commentary, and I felt very much the pressure of the clock-the one on my wrist, not the biological one. So, floundering about for something to say that would be properly comforting and yet hint at my need for immediate departure, all I could come up with was, "Well, I'm sure he means well."

Deborah stared at me long enough to make me wonder if I had really said the right thing. Then she sighed heavily and turned to face out the window again. "Yeah," she said. "I'm sure he means well, too." And she looked out at the bay and didn't say anything but, worse than any words she could have uttered, she actually sighed.

This was a side of my sister I had not seen before, and it was not a side I wanted to see a great deal more of. I was used to Deborah being full of sound and fury, signifying arm punches. To see her soft and vulnerable and roiling with self-pity was unsettling in the extreme. Even though I knew I should say something comforting, I had no idea where to begin, and so I stood there awkwardly, until finally the need to leave was stronger than my sense of obligation.

"I'm sorry, Debs," I said, and oddly enough, I was. "I have to get the kids now."

"Yeah," she said without turning around. "Go get your kids."

"Um," I said, "I need a ride, back to my car."

She turned slowly away from the window and looked over at the building's door, where Ms. Stein was hovering. Then she nodded and stood up. "All right," she said. "We're done here." She walked past me, paused only to thank Ms. Stein with flat politeness, and led the way back to her car in silence.

The silence lasted almost all the way to my car and it was not very comfortable. I felt like I should say something, lift the mood a bit, but my first two attempts fell so flat that I stopped trying. Debs pulled into the parking lot at work and stopped beside my car, staring straight ahead through the windshield with the same look of unhappy introspection she'd been wearing for the whole trip. I watched her for a moment, but she didn't look back.

"All right," I said at last. "See you tomorrow."

"What's it like?" she said, and I paused with the door half-open.

"What's what like?" I said.

"When you held your baby for the first time," she said.

I didn't have to think very hard to answer that. "Amazing," I said. "Absolutely wonderful. It's not like anything else in the world."

She looked at me, and I couldn't tell whether she was going to hug me or hit me, but she didn't do either, and finally she just shook her head, slowly. "Go get your kids," she said. I waited for a second, to see if she would say anything else, but she didn't.

I got out of the car and as she drove slowly away I stood and watched, trying to fathom what was going on with my sister. But it was clearly something far too complicated for a newly minted human, so I shrugged it off, got into my car, and went to get Cody and Astor.

Traffic was heavy as I drove south on old Cutler Road to pick up Cody and Astor, but for some reason everyone seemed to be very polite in this part of town tonight. A man driving a large red Hummer even paused to let me in when the lanes merged and I had to get over, which I had never seen before. It made me wonder if perhaps terrorists had slipped something into the Miami water system to make us all soft and lovable. First I had resolved to quit my Dark Ways; then Debs had thrown a fit of near-weeping-and now a Hummer driver in rush hour was polite and thoughtful. Could this be the Apocalypse?

But I saw no flaming angels on the remainder of the drive to the park where Cody and Astor were interred, and once again I got there just before six o'clock. The same young woman was waiting by the door with Cody and Astor, jiggling her keys and practically dancing with impatience. She very nearly flung the children at me and then, with a mechanical smile that was not in the same league as one of my fakes, she vaulted for her car at the far end of the parking lot.

I loaded Cody and Astor into the backseat of my car and climbed behind the wheel. They were relatively silent, even Astor, and so, in my role of new human father I decided I should open them up a little bit. "Did everybody have a good day?" I said with immense synthetic good cheer.

"Anthony is such an asshole," Astor said.

"Astor, you shouldn't use that word," I told her, mildly shocked.

"Even Mom says that word when she's driving," she said. "And anyway, I heard it on the radio in her car."

"Well, you still shouldn't use it," I said. "It's a bad word."

"You don't have to talk me to like that," she said. "I'm ten years old."

"That's not old enough to use that word," I said. "No matter how I talk to you."

"So you don't care what Anthony did?" she said. "You just want to make sure I don't use that word?"

I took a deep breath and made a special effort not to ram the car in front of me. "What did Anthony do?" I said.

"He said I wasn't hot," Astor said. "Because I don't have any boobs."

I felt my mouth open and close a few times, all by itself, and just in time I remembered that I still needed to breathe. I was clearly in far over my head, but just as clearly I had to say something. "Well, I-I, um, ah," I said, quite distinctly. "I mean, very few of us do have boobs at ten."

"He's such a butt-head," she said darkly, and then, in a very syrupy-sweet tone, she added, "Can I say butt-head, Dexter?"

I opened my mouth again to stammer something or other but before I could utter a single meaningless syllable Cody spoke up. "Somebody's following us," he said.

Out of reflex I glanced in the rearview mirror. In this traffic, it was impossible for me to tell if somebody was, in fact, following us. "Why do you say that, Cody?" I asked. "How can you tell?"

In the mirror I could see him shrug. "Shadow Guy," he said.

I sighed again. First Astor with her barrage of forbidden language, and now Cody with his Shadow Guy. Obviously, I was in for one of those memorable evenings parents have now and then. "Cody, the Shadow Guy can be wrong sometimes," I said.

He shook his head. "Same car," he said.

"Same as what?"

"It's the car from the hospital parking lot," Astor interpreted. "The red one, where you said the guy wasn't looking at us but he really was. And now he's following us even though you think he isn't."

I like to think I am a reasonable man, even in unreasonable situations, like most of those involving kids. But at this point, I felt I had let unreality intrude just a little too far, and a small lesson was called for. Besides, if I was going to follow my resolve to cross over to the sunny side of the street, I had to start weaning them away from their dark imaginations at some point, and this was as good a time as any.

"All right," I said. "Let's see if he really is following us."

I moved into the left lane and signaled for a turn. Nobody followed us. "Do you see anybody?" I said.

"No," Astor said, very grumpily.

I turned left down a street beside a strip mall. "Is anybody following us now?"

"No," said Astor.

I accelerated down the street and turned right. "How about now?" I called cheerfully. "Anybody behind us?"

"Dexter," Astor grumbled.

I pulled over in front of a small and ordinary house much like ours, putting two wheels on the grass and my foot on the brake. "And now? Anybody following us?" I said, trying not to gloat audibly at making my point so dramatically.