A Father For The Twins. Callie Endicott

help earn money for college.”

      “Good luck in getting there now,” Dermott muttered.

      Elizabeth glared at his bent head. It wasn’t his business to criticize, especially a kid that he didn’t even know.

      “Never mind him,” she whispered to Glen with a conspiratorial air. “We need all the doctors we can get and I’m sure you’ll be wonderful at it.”

      Glen’s brow had creased at Dermott’s statement, but now he relaxed and smiled back.

      “Do you live in Seattle?” the boy asked.

      “We’re visiting from Albuquerque, but we’ve rented an apartment so we can stay and...and see the area.”

      “Wow, that’s great. We moved here last summer and Aunt Cassie has taken us all over the place. In May, we went to the Gingko Petrified Forest and we’ve gone to British Columbia twice. We go to baseball games, Mount Rainier and the Seattle Center, along with Mount St. Helens. It’s like...sad, but also rad seeing what happened when the volcano blasted everything.”

      What a nice boy, Elizabeth thought. His enthusiasm was endearing.

      “Those are good suggestions. I remember when the volcano erupted. It seemed terrible that such a beautiful place got destroyed, but I suppose that’s how it formed in the first place.”

      “That’s what Aunt Cassie says. Scientists have done all kinds of studies on how the land is recovering, which is a bunch faster than anyone figured. Some of the eruptions were crazy, mostly just super-heated air and rocks that flattened huge trees like toothpicks.” He made a gesture with his hands that was probably intended to represent the trees being knocked over.

      “I hope the park rangers know as much as you.”

      “Aunt Cassie tells me a lot and we look things up on the internet and read books. The park rangers are great, too. My uncle works at Mount Rainier. But he’s a backcountry ranger, so we don’t see him much.”

      “Your aunt sounds nice.”

      “She’s awesome. On Saturday, she’s taking us to a science fiction convention. Aunt Cassie likes that stuff just as much as we do.”

      “It sounds interesting.”

      “I can’t wait, though we aren’t dressing up in costumes the way the science nerds do in the Big Bang Theory.”

      Elizabeth’s lips twitched. She enjoyed the television comedy, though Dermott wasn’t crazy about it. He preferred home improvement shows.

      “You probably think I’m too old to appreciate sci-fi, but I love the Star Wars and Star Trek films along with other science fiction or fantasy,” she told Glen.

      Once her secret hope had been to get published in science fiction, but while she had written several stories, it had never gone further. She’d been writing since she was a child, but there had never seemed to be enough time or energy to get them ready for submission to a publisher. Now? Well, her stories were probably too dated.

      Yet part of her wondered...was there still a chance she could get published? She’d even brought one of her novels with her, thinking she might work on it some more.

      “Do you want to go to the convention?” Glen asked. “Aunt Cassie got a bunch of free passes and I think she has some left.”

      The friendly invitation was appealing and she looked at Dermott. “What do you think, dear? It sounds fun and it’s different than the things we usually do.”

      He let out a small grunt. “Whatever you want, but I thought we came up here to see Adam, not people dressed as Klingons.”

      Elizabeth was mildly startled that her husband knew about Klingons, which came from the Star Trek