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“Forget about Gigi!” Nance slammed her fist on his desk, causing his desk light to blink. “I can’t stay here anymore and watch you flirt with the Dixie chick. I was going to tell your wife about you and Gigi. I want to tell her, but I’ll leave that to you. This is my last day here.”

“You’re quitting?”

“Got that right, sailor.” She flung her red lunch bag into his trash can. “Now go home and be a husband and a daddy.” She stood up and marched out.

Vic sat behind his desk, stunned. Should he find this funny? Should he be offended? Outraged? The woman had threatened him, for God’s sake. What had happened to the sweet little old lady who’d sat in his living room two months ago, eating cake and complimenting? Who was this nasty busybody? Whoever she was, she had some nerve.

* * *

When Vic pulled into the driveway he saw Otis standing in the lower part of the backyard holding a blue metal wand about as long as his forearm. He was shirtless and barefoot, which was unusually careless for him—worried as he usually was about sunburn and fire ants.

He had his back turned, and so Vic tried to sneak up on him. This seemed to be his day for that. Catching people in the act. Except that he knew what Gigi was doing as soon as he saw her. With Otis, not so much. Vic was struck, again, by how strange it was that his son was a man with hair on his chest, six feet three inches tall, an inch taller then Vic was.

Otis was looking at a little screen on the object, which had a gauge with a red flashing light on it.

“Is that a Geiger counter?”

Unlike Gigi, Otis didn’t jump or yell or even seem startled, because he wasn’t. Of course, he’d heard his father’s car and seen him coming. He was just ignoring his father, watching the needle jump on his machine.

“Oats. I asked you a question.”

“Just a minute,” he said, not looking at Vic, wanting only for his father to go away.

Vic stood there, trying to be patient, when God knows he wasn’t in a patient mood. He felt guilty that he’d allowed himself to be shut out of Otis’s life, and he was angry about having to feel guilty. He knew he should fire Gigi and never have a thing to do with her again and come clean with his boss and risk losing his job; tell Caroline about his dalliance (not an affair, not yet); go in and ask Suzi what was new in her life, as Nancy Archer had commanded him to do, but he didn’t feel ready to do any of that.

Finally Otis turned around and looked at him, eyes unfocused. “Huh?”

Vic asked him the question again.

“Er, well, yeah. Geiger counter. Used.”

“Why do you need it? There’s no radiation in our yard, is there?” Vic knew he should stop talking, but he kept on, running his trap, giving Otis an out. “So, why are you doing this? Just for fun?”

“Yeah,” Otis said, smiling that angelic, surfer-boy grin. “Just for fun!”

“So, what’s it say? Is there anything radioactive?”

Otis looked at Vic like he was the stupidest person to walk the planet. “Do you hear any clicking? That’s what it does if something’s radioactive. Anyway, there’s small amounts of radiation everywhere.”

“Why’s the red light blinking and the needle jumping around?”

“That just shows you it’s working. Okay? God!” Otis went from 0 to 150 in a split second. “Can’t I do anything around here without people asking me a hundred frigging questions?”

Vic took a step back. “Come with me to get some ice cream. I won’t ask you any more questions. We’ll just talk about whatever. The weather. There’s another tropical storm out there. Grayson.”

“I’m already doing something, in case you can’t tell.”

“I love you, Otis.”

No reply.

“Just wanted you to know.” Vic turned, deciding not to go into the house and face any kind of music at all, and trudged back to his car. There probably wouldn’t be any music inside his house to face anyhow. Caroline wouldn’t want to stop whatever she was doing to listen to his tale of woe about Gigi cheating. She’d barely even noticed that he’d been going out after work almost every