Dexter Is Dead

ELEVEN

Brian had two storm anchors in the back of his van. We wired Octavio to one and his new friend to the other, and muscled them both into the water of the quarry. They sank quickly, leaving not even a ripple to show where they had been, and I tried very hard not to see that as a metaphor for my life at the moment. It didn’t work. All I could see was the sad Detritus of Dexter sinking into the dark abyss, cold and murky water closing over my head, leaving no trace at all of the wonder that had been Me.

All the way back to U.S. 1, Brian kept up a polite stream of inconsequential chatter. I responded with monosyllables, for the most part. There didn’t seem to be a single ray of hope for me anywhere. Either I would be yanked off the streets and flung in a cell again or, if I was really lucky, I would merely be chopped and shredded by Raul’s men. The odds against my coming out the far end of this long dark tunnel were so monumental that I was more likely to grow wings and learn to grant wishes. Once again, saddest of all, I found that all my bitter thoughts led to the same place, the tragically mundane refrain of Why Me? It took away any possibility of finding nobility in my suffering. I was just another poor schlub caught up in something he could not control. Dexter’s Dilemma — and the most pathetic part of it all was that it was identical with what is generally known as the Human Condition. Me: reduced to mere Humanity. It wasn’t even worth one of my high-quality synthetic mocking laughs, not even to rub Brian’s nose in the fact that I did it much better than he did.

We drove back to the doughnut shop where I’d left my car, idling past once on U.S. 1 while we looked for any sign of untoward activity, Legal or Otherwise, around my car. There was no sign of anything: no police cruiser or unmarked car, and as far as we could see, there was no conga line of swarthy killers with machine guns, either.

Just to be safe, Brian drove around the block and approached the parking lot from the rear. He pulled up on the street, in the shadow of a large old banyan tree, and put the van in park. For a moment we both sat silently. I don’t know what Brian was thinking, but I was still scrabbling across the rough tundra of my brainscape, looking for a way out of the unfolding unending hopelessness of being Me nowadays. As far as I could see, there wasn’t one.

“Well,” Brian said eventually.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

“Cheer up, brother,” he said. “Keep smiling.”

“What on earth for?”

He smiled. “It confuses people?” he said.

I sighed. “I’m afraid it’s beyond me at the moment,” I said. I opened the door. “I’ll find another hotel and let you know where I am.”

“By phone?” he said, sounding rather anxious. “I mean — I suppose the business with the credit card has made me overcautious, but—”

“You’re right,” I said, mentally kicking myself; I should have thought of that. “Let’s meet here, at the doughnut shop, for breakfast.”

“A wonderful thought,” Brian said. “I do like fresh doughnuts.”

“Eight o’clock?” I said, and he nodded. “All right, then.” I jumped down out of the van and Brian put it into gear.

“Good night,” he said as I reached to close the door. It was a wonderful sentiment, but it seemed unlikely, so I just nodded and trudged over to my rental car.

I found a small and anonymous motel just south of Goulds, a little north of Homestead. It was an old-style one-story hotel, clearly built in the fifties to accommodate weary Northerners as they rested from motoring down the old Dixie Highway and exploring the wonders of Florida. The place was run by a mom and pop who really should have retired no later than 1963. They seemed surprised and a little put out that somebody would interrupt their TV viewing by asking for a room, but I showed them cash, and after a certain amount of grumbling, they gave me a key and pointed away toward the left wing.

My room was halfway down a row of identically tatty doors with peeling paint and missing numerals. The inside was no better; it smelled like mothballs and mildew and was nearly as tiny as my cell had been. But I hoped that the place was small enough to be off the grid somewhat. And the proprietors had shown no sign of any technical savvy beyond changing channels on their old TV set — and not even with a remote control — so perhaps they would simply pocket my cash without leaving any trace on the information grid.

I locked the door and secured it with the rusty chain that hung there, and then walked over to the bed and looked it over. A large part of the mothball smell seemed to be coming from the bedspread, and the two pillows were so flat I thought they might just be empty pillowcases. I put one hand on the mattress and felt it. It offered all the firm support of a bag of fresh marshmallows. But it was a bed, and I was suddenly very tired.

I flopped onto the bed — a little too energetically, as it turned out. It was apparently a few years older than my hosts, and it did not merely sag; I actually felt my back touch the floor. Then it moved a few inches upward again, leaving me in a half-folded position that was already starting to give me back pain. The mattress in my other hotel room had been bad enough; this one was far worse, enough to make me nostalgic for the nice hard shelf they’d let me sleep on in jail.

I turned and twisted and finally found a position that was not actually painful, though it was very far from comfy. So much to do, and so many distractions. Was it really only this morning that I woke up in a cell? It seemed impossible — so much had happened since that it seemed like another lifetime. But it was true; mere hours ago I had been blinking in the sunlight, thrilled at my reentry into a world with fewer steel bars. And I spent most of the day convinced that nothing in the world could possibly be worse than going back to jail — until my brother had very thoughtfully provided a couple of new options that were far, far worse.

But I still had to keep myself free. I pushed my brain away from contemplating the hordes of savage drug-crazed assassins who were no doubt sniffing my trail, and I forced myself to think about my real agenda, keeping Dexter out of jail and, if possible, putting Anderson in.

Let’s see; I had just decided on independent action. I needed to find some proof that…what was it again? I was distracted by an enormous yawn that seemed to take over my entire body. Proof — I needed to show that Robert was a pedophile, and Anderson had played games with evidence. I remembered that I had decided my first step was to talk to Vince, ask him to help me gather some stuff that — Another enormous yawn. Something about Anderson being a bad guy or something, that was it. Good old Vince. Bad old Anderson.

I felt a third yawn coming on, and I could tell that this one would leave the other two far behind in the dust. It felt so powerful, overwhelming, gigantic that I was afraid it might actually crack me in half, and I fought against it for a few valiant seconds, and then…

—

The sun was doing its very best to break through the tattered mildew-smelling curtains when I opened my eyes. Somehow it had turned into morning — and an obnoxiously bright and cheerful one, too, just to rub salt in all my psychic wounds. It’s very hard to maintain a properly grumpy perspective when the sun is beaming down from a cloudless sky, and the voice of the turtle is so clearly warming up in the wings. But I tried; I lay there unmoving for a while, wondering if it was even worth getting out of bed. If I did, some new and awful disaster would almost certainly leap out of the closet and wrestle me to the floor. And the floor did not look terribly inviting — yellowed, peeling linoleum that had probably been put down to celebrate Eisenhower’s inauguration.

On the other hand, if I just lay here on my marshmallow mattress, all the other wicked and unwarranted beasties pursuing me would eventually catch up. Not really a terribly enticing choice either way.

So I lay on my back on the horribly soft bed and avoided making the choice. It was nearly comfortable, even though my knees were surprisingly close to my head. Sometime in the night, my body had curved into the shape of the letter “U,” as the bed yielded around me. It wasn’t so bad, almost the same position as lying in a hammock, and I’d never heard a sailor complain about that. Of course, I did not ordinarily hang out with sailors — but surely some word would have trickled out.

I lay there, and I thought grumpy thoughts that were only partly generated by my waking up so recently. I grumbled, and it might even be said that I pouted. But eventually a small but potent voice sounded in the depths of my very being, that tiny nagging whisper that has so often guided me, the righteous glowing arrow that always points my way, lights my footsteps, and sends me down the right path, no matter what. There is no denying this Voice when it speaks, for it is never wrong and never out of order. It spoke to me now, softly but insistently, and what it said was, I’m hungry.

And once again, I realized that it spoke the truth. I was hungry. Very hungry, in fact. I am blessed with a total lack of conscience, but my keen sense of hunger takes its place quite ably and keeps my feet on the proper trail. And with a jolt of guilt that very nearly approached panic, I realized I’d had no dinner. What had I been thinking? There was no excuse for such rash and careless behavior. Shame on Dexter.

With that clarion call of duty ringing in my ears, I remembered that I had said I would meet Brian for breakfast. I glanced at my watch: seven-fifteen. I had plenty of time — but on the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to get there early and get a head start on the doughnuts.

I sat up — or to be accurate, I tried to sit up. The bed had wrapped its soft and spongy tendrils around me and locked me into a kind of death grip and it would not let go. I struggled, I fought, I rolled to one side — and the edge of the bed completely collapsed under me and dumped me onto the floor. I landed badly, hitting my left elbow and right knee. And even as I felt a new pain blooming in my elbow, I could not help noticing that the floor was wonderfully firm. Perhaps I could sleep here tonight.

I pushed myself up carefully into a sitting position. That hurt even more. Between the unaccustomed exercise of the day before and the dreadful clutch of the bed, there was nothing left of my back but a vast area of numbness and pain. I tried stretching, twisting from side to side, and after only a few minutes I was somehow able to stagger to my feet and totter to the bathroom. I was quite sure that if I could only get a nice hot stream of water pouring onto my back, my spine would loosen up and return me to something that approached functioning.

And it may well be that I was right. Sadly, we will never know, because the ancient showerhead in the bathroom put out only a thin trickle of rust-tinted water, none of it warmer than room temperature. Nevertheless, I clenched my teeth and stood under it as long as I could, and if nothing else it did wake me up and put me in a proper mood to face what was certain to be a truly awful day.

I climbed out of the shower and stood there dripping, looking around for a towel. I finally found one — but only one — and it was about the size of a large washcloth. I did my best to dry off anyway, more or less pushing the water off me and onto the floor.

I got dressed in a brand-new set of clothes: underwear and socks right out of the package, jeans still stiff and smelling like…well, like new jeans, I suppose. I topped this chic ensemble with one of Walmart’s finest and most fashionable guayaberas, and I was ready for anything.

Just to show that things were finally going my way, my little red rental car was right where I’d left it, in the space closest to my room. Even better, the key still fit, and the car started right up with the first try. What a wonderful thing life can be when it puts a little effort into things.

I drove north on U.S. 1, and the morning traffic was already thick enough to make me wonder whether I would get there on time, let alone early. At 216th Street a large truckload of tomatoes had spilled out onto the road. Behind the truck where the load had spilled, a very big man with a shaved head was slugging it out with a shorter man who sported a black ponytail. It looked like the short man was winning. They stood up to their ankles in tomatoes, slinging punches with very bad intentions, and traffic slowed to a crawl, and then even less than a crawl.

I am not made out of stone; I understood full well that the spectacle was worth watching, even if it meant slowing and making several thousand people late for work while you watched and hoped both fighters would fall into the tomatoes before you crawled past. But it was precisely because I am not made of stone, and I felt very urgent hunger pangs clawing at my stomach, that I did something that can only be called a Classic Miami Move. I twisted the steering wheel, fought my way over to the shoulder, and with two wheels completely off the road, I drove the half block to the closest cross street.

Several angry horn blasts followed me, but I ignored them. It would have been more proper, or at least in keeping with tradition, to extend my middle finger, but I kept to the high ground, maintaining my poise and returning only a lofty sneer. After all, I learned to drive here. I know my rights.

I worked my way a half mile north on side streets and then turned back up onto U.S. 1. The traffic was much lighter now, since the flow had been so thoroughly choked off at the scene of Tomatopalooza. I pulled into the lot and parked at the doughnut shop thirteen minutes early. There was no sign of Brian, so I collected a large coffee, a bear claw, and a cruller, took a booth at the back, and sat facing the door.

I had disposed of the cruller and half of the bear claw when Brian came in. He looked around, careful but nonchalant, and then bought himself a large coffee and two cream-filled doughnuts with brightly colored sprinkles on top. He slid into the booth facing me and took a large bite. “Mmm,” he said.

“Yes, but really, Brian,” I said. “Sprinkles? Are you already in your second childhood?”

He smiled, revealing a row of teeth bedecked with cream filling and rainbow-colored sprinkles. “Why not?” he said, his voice thick with doughnut. “I never actually got my first one.”

“Well,” I said, looking with quiet satisfaction at the remains of my steady, no-nonsense bear claw, “no accounting for taste.”

“Mmp,” he said agreeably, and shoved half of the doughnut into his mouth. He washed it down with coffee and started on his second doughnut while I finished my bear claw and wondered whether it would be considered greedy if I topped it off with a couple of Bavarian creams. I decided that no one could possibly criticize me for having only one, and I bought one and used it to help the rest of my coffee go down smoothly.

Brian made one more trip to the counter, too, returning with a cake doughnut smeared with maple frosting, leaving me to ponder once again the vast marvels of heredity versus environment.

“Well,” Brian said, as we sipped at the last of our coffees. “Where shall we begin?”

“I suppose with my new address,” I said, and I told him the location of my little Shangri-la. He nodded and took a sip of his coffee.

“And on to new business,” he said happily. “How should we stay alive today?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But you have to remember that I have my own agenda, too. I want to stay out of jail.”

He arched his eyebrows at me. “Yes, of course, but really,” he said, “isn’t staying alive more important?”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” I told him.

“Death is much easier to arrange, I’m afraid,” he said, shaking his head.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I have to do what I can.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose you’re not much good if you’re in jail.”

“Exactly my point,” I said.

He waggled a finger at me. “But sooner or later, having two separate agendas is going to cause trouble.”

“Well,” I told him with my customary lighthearted touch, “perhaps I’ll think of a way to merge them.” And I thought happily of sending a troop of drogas after Anderson. A happy ending for all — he would even get a hero’s funeral, which was certainly a great deal more than he deserved. “But, Brian — I don’t know how much good I am out of jail. I mean — I can’t risk carrying a weapon of any kind. And that’s…Seriously, what’s the plan?”

Brian said nothing, just finished off his coffee, and to my mind he looked a little bit shifty, as if he hoped his ostentatious coffee swallowing would distract me and I wouldn’t remember what I’d asked him.

It didn’t work. He put down the cup, looked vaguely out the window.

“Brian,” I said, a little testy, “you do have some kind of plan, don’t you?”

He looked back at me, hesitated, and then shrugged. “To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I was hoping something might occur to us.”

I noticed that he said us, and that was almost as irritating as his notion of winging it when pursued by a horde of assassins. “All this time, nothing has occurred to you?” I said.

“One thing did,” he said, trying hard for a tone of injured righteousness. “I got you out.”

I felt myself grinding my teeth together at the realization that, just like Deborah, Brian had decided that when the going gets tough, the tough get Dexter — and then they make him do all the work. “This is my problem?” I said with some heat. “I’m supposed to figure out how to keep us both alive?”

“Well,” he said. “I mean, you had a much better education.”

“Yes, but he’s your drug lord,” I said, and I realized that he’d succeeded in knocking away my cool control and I was speaking much too loudly. I lowered my voice. “I don’t know the first thing about these people, Brian,” I said. “Not what they’re likely to do, or how they’ll do it, or — Nothing at all. How am I even supposed to find them?”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Brian said soothingly. “I’m quite sure they’ll find us.”

For some reason, I could not find any comfort in that. “Wonderful,” I said. “And I can assume they know what they’re doing, of course.”

“Of course,” he said happily. “Some of them are very good, too.” He smiled, and even though it was the closest to a real smile I’d ever seen from Brian, the effect was spoiled somewhat by the bright pink, blue, and green sprinkles stuck to his teeth. “Let’s just hope we’re a little better,” he said.

I ground my teeth some more. It didn’t actually do any good, but it was probably better than leaping across the tabletop and sinking my canines into Brian’s neck. “All right,” I said. “So your wonderful plan is to wait until they come after us, and then be better than them.”

“A little oversimplified,” he said. “But accurate.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. When I opened my eyes again, Brian was looking at me with a happy little smirk on his face. “How will they do it?” I asked him. “I mean, if it won’t spoil your plan to tell me.”

“Oh, not at all,” he said. “I know how Raul thinks — I mean, I ran so many of these little errands for him, and he got very specific most of the time.” He nodded, and at least he lost the smirk. “He hasn’t found me yet, and he is not a patient man. So his first move will be to try to frighten me so I’ll do something silly and become visible.”

“Frighten you with something like killing Octavio, and dumping him in a room you got with that credit card?” I asked.

“Mmmm, maybe,” Brian said thoughtfully. “Of course, he wanted to kill Octavio anyway, and…You know, I was really looking for something a little splashier.”

“And if we survive the splash?” I asked.

“Then we watch for his men,” he said. “Whatever they do, they’ll be very close, watching for us. We find them first.”

I sighed again, wondering whether Brian really believed it would be that simple. “All right, fine, we wait,” I said. At least I could do that without too much effort. And in the meantime…“I can use the time to try to stay out of jail.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “You do what you must. When something happens, I’ll call you.” He hesitated slightly, and then, looking a little uneasy, he added, “But do watch your back, brother.”

“I plan to,” I said.

He nodded. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“The whole case against me is pure fiction, made up by Anderson,” I said. “If I can find something to show he tampered with evidence—”

“He did tamper, didn’t he?” Brian asked.

“Only when he didn’t just invent it,” I said. “So I thought I would have a quiet chat with Vince Masuoka.”

Brian nodded. “That would certainly be a good place to start,” he said. “He seemed very…indignant?”

“Perhaps he still is,” I said.

He still was. I called him from my car after Brian left me with a promise to get in touch this evening, and Vince answered right away, speaking in a kind of shocked and reverent whisper. “Dexter, my God,” he said. “I can’t believe — I mean, I really tried to — Shit. I can’t talk now. I’m in the lab, and there’s—”

“Can you meet me for lunch?” I said.

“I think so, if I — Yes. I mean, I’ll do what I can to — I can get away around noon?”

“Good,” I said. “Meet me at Lunar Sushi.”

“I will,” he said in an eager whisper. “I mean, I’ll try. And if — Oh! Somebody’s coming…!”

“See you at noon, Vince,” I said, and broke the connection.

I had three hours to fill before then, and not a great deal to fill them with. I thought about going back to my hotel room, and firmly rejected the idea on humanitarian grounds. If I wasn’t going to rest, then the most natural thing would be to eat. But I had just eaten, and I would be eating more when I met with Vince, so it really seemed like a bit much to kill time between meals by eating. I thought about it anyway. After all, doughnuts are not really substantial, are they? Very little protein in the average bear claw, in spite of the name. And since I hadn’t partaken of the garish sprinkles my brother gorged himself on, I’d had nothing green to eat, either.

I remembered a map I’d drawn in my cell, after days of unspeakable swill they laughingly referred to as “food” at the TGK. The map traced a route that wound its way through South Miami, into the Grove, and then over to Miami Beach. At every point along the route where there was a restaurant I liked, I had placed an ornate little star and a small icon of the appropriate kind of food: tiny pizzas, sushi rolls, stone crabs, and so on. It had been my whimsical thought that if I ever saw the clear light of freedom again, I would trace the whole course, stopping at each star to sample their icon.

I could start my trip now, work my way through the first four or five, and end up close to Lunar Sushi just in time for my lunch with Vince. The idea had its charms — but on the whole, I couldn’t make myself believe that gorging myself was the best way to spend my time when both Life and Liberty hung so tenuously in the balance, presumably to be joined at any moment by Pursuit of Happiness. I put the thought away.

What I really needed to do was to keep a low profile, avoid any chance of discovery by either the Good Guys, as played by Anderson, or the Bad Guys, starring Raul and a cast of thousands. Since I had already ruled out returning to my miserable, bone-breaking hotel room, there were very few options left to me. I could always take out my boat; I’d be relatively safe in the middle of Biscayne Bay, and I would see anyone approaching. But the odds were fifty-fifty that Anderson at the least, and maybe Raul’s team as well, knew about the boat, and had it watched. It wasn’t worth the risk.

That didn’t leave too many places — to be perfectly honest, it left exactly none that actually sprang to mind. So I drove north, since that was the direction I was pointed in when I left the doughnut shop. At least it led me farther away from the torture equipment laughingly referred to as a bed that crouched in my hotel room awaiting its prey.

The morning rush hour was dying down at last, and the traffic moved easily enough all the way up to Le Jeune Road. Still with no definite goal in mind, I turned left and headed toward Coconut Grove.

As I drove along through the center of the Grove, I marveled yet again at how much had changed since I grew up here. Most of the shops I had known then were gone, replaced by different, new shops filled with totally different overpriced and pointless items. Of course, there were a few landmarks that hadn’t changed since the dawn of time. The park was still pretty much as it had been, and across from it the library was still there, though it was now partially hidden by the newer buildings that had sprung up around it. I had spent many happy hours in the library, trying to find a book that would explain to me once and for all how to act human — and when I was a little older, a book that might tell me why I should bother.

As I turned onto McFarlane Road and headed down the hill toward the library, I wondered whether it might not be a good place to lay low for a few hours. It was cool, quiet, and had both Internet and reading matter aplenty. And then, right in front of the building, I saw that there was a parking space open. In the memory of living man, this had never happened before, so I took it as a sign from God and made an immediate U-turn. I slid into the spot and parked, and thinking that I might do a little bit of diligent low-profile digging while I waited, I grabbed up the folder of legal papers I had been given at the jail when they returned my stuff.

I locked the car, put an enormous amount of money into the meter, and went into the library. I found a nice, quiet spot over by the back window and sat down to go through my folder. What with finding corpses and so on, I’d been far too busy to open the folder; I hadn’t even glanced at it yet. I’d assumed that it was copies of the great heap of paperwork that is required to do absolutely anything nowadays, especially within the bureaucratic hell that is Official Miami. I knew from experience that the Department of Corrections demanded many pages of mind-numbing trivia even for something as simple as getting a box of paper clips, and I expected that the actual release of a prisoner would generate several reams of stilted prose.

But when I opened the folder, the first clump of papers I saw on top of the heap did not carry the imprint of Corrections. Instead, the letterhead said, Department of Children and Families.

For a long moment I just stared, and then my very first thought was a rather plaintive, But I’m an adult! And then luckily, a couple of gray cells floated up to the surface and suggested that some overworked and underbrained bureaucrat had obviously stuffed somebody else’s papers in my folder by mistake. It was a simple, laughable error, and no doubt I would even laugh at it someday, if I lived. I picked up the offending paperwork, intending to fling it in the nearest receptacle — and my eye caught a single word: Astor.

I paused, long enough to see that this word was joined to another, Morgan, and right next to it there were more: Cody Morgan, and Lily Anne Morgan. Since these were the names of my three children, it seemed far too much to write it off as coincidence, so I put the paper back down on the table in front of me and looked it over.

After a quick examination of several pages of baroque legal language, I concluded that the party of the first part, one Dexter Morgan, having acted contra bonos mores as well as cum gladiis et fustubus was now de facto and de jure a persona non grata in his role as legal guardian of said minor children. Further deponent sayeth that the party of the second part, hight Deborah Morgan, acting as amicus paterna in uberrima fides, did solemnly swear and affirm cum hoc ergo propter hoc that she would therefore ipso facto assume completely and totally the role of guardian ad litem, in loco parentis. The party of the first part hereby confirms that this ad idem agreement shall supersede all others and in witness thereof affixes his signature, quod erat demonstrandum, et pedicabo te.

Or words to that effect; there was an awful lot, and not all of it was in such nice Latin, but the gist of it was that I was signing over all my rights and privileges as sole surviving parent of Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne, and naming Deborah as their new mommy, which was probably in the document somewhere as materfamilias.

In my humble opinion, it is a very great credit to me that this time I did not blink or gape, as I had done so much lately. I remembered right away that when Deborah had finally come to see me in jail, she had asked me to sign over custody of the kids. It had been the sole reason that she finally made herself overcome her complete, violent, and totally understandable nausea caused by looking at me.

Of course, things were a little different now — I was no longer in jail. It was true that I would probably return there, unless I was chopped into bits by savage cartel assassins before then. Even so, did I really want to do this? Completely abandon all my paternal rights and privileges?

My first thought was a mean-spirited, No! The kids were mine, and no one was going to take them away from me, not Deborah or anyone else. But when I reflected on that for just a few moments, I realized that this was not a well-thought-out response.

How did I really feel about my kids? Of course, only Lily Anne was truly my child, biologically speaking. But Cody and Astor were Children of Darkness, just like me. I was their spiritual father, as well as legal, and I had promised to set their feet safely onto the Dark Path. I had failed miserably so far — just never got around to it, what with the frantic pace of school and homework and dentist and pediatrician and new sneakers. It was always, Yes, of course, later, and later never came. Why is it that there’s never enough time to do anything, unless it’s so immediate that not doing it results in instant catastrophe?

It was hard to feel guilty about failing to train them to be successful predators, but I did manage a little regret, at least. And Lily Anne — she was untouched by Shadow, a near-perfect creature of burbling pink light. Quite impossible to believe that she carried my DNA, but she did; Lily Anne, alone in all the world, would take the entire genetic wonder that was Dexter and carry it into the future, so that fabulous me would not be lost from the gene pool, and that was a very nice thought.

But she would do that just as well without me — perhaps better. In truth, didn’t she deserve something better than a father like me? Deborah would provide a positive role model, something I could never hope to do. And Cody and Astor would be who they were, who they had to be, whether I was there or not. So the only real question was, Did I really want to be there? Enough to fight it out with Deborah and the courts? Was I really that protective of my rights and privileges?

I thought about that for a good two minutes, and to be perfectly honest, I only thought of one or two rights, and I couldn’t think of any privileges at all. It had been my experience that fatherhood was mostly a matter of suffering the insufferable, tolerating the intolerable, and changing diapers. Where was the joy in the endless screeching, door slamming, and name-calling? Was it a privilege to sacrifice time, money, and sanity to a snarling horde of sticky ingrates?

I tried very hard to come up with a few fondly remembered moments of joy. There didn’t seem to be any. There was once when I got home late and I was just in time to keep Cody from eating the last piece of Rita’s Orange Chicken. I’d been happy then, or at least relieved. And another time Astor threw her shoes at me, and one of them missed. That had been good, too.

But joy? Actual parental ecstasy? I couldn’t recall any.

If I was truly honest with myself, which is not as easy as it sounds, I had to admit that I didn’t really enjoy fatherhood. I simply endured it, because it was part of the disguise that hid Dexter the Wolf from the world of sheep I lived in. And as far as I could tell, the kids merely endured me, too. I was not a good father. I tried, but it was strictly pro forma. My heart was never in it, and I was just no good at it.

So if I didn’t really want to be Dear Old Dad, and if the kids were truly better off without me — why was I waffling?

No real reason. I signed.