'I'M A BEAR!' a voice boomed, and Daddy's laughing face bobbed into the light. Ruthless fingers tickled and tickled. Both Frankie and Ripley screamed with laughter and delight.

Crowded as it was, Thomas lay with his kids, joking and poking, until they both drifted asleep. Afterward, he turned the flashlight on its head so that it was little more than a ring of light against the ground, then carefully made his way from the tent.

'Aaaarh,' he softly growled as he did up the zipper, making a face he found funny because he knew how his kids would have giggled had they seen it. He walked to the back patio and took a seat.

He fished a Rolling Rock out of his cooler, popped it, then surveyed the dark expanse of his backyard: the bland fence, the lonely maple, the kids' swing set, the space where he and Nora had once talked about putting an in-ground pool. He felt at once sad and proud, the way he imagined many men felt when taking stock of their humble kingdoms.

Strange the way that word, mine, so often stirred shame when attached to things.

That shed is mine, he thought, taking a drink. Loser-shed… Mine.

The significance of small childhood traumas had been all but discounted in psychological circles. Kids were doughty little buggers, those in the know now believed, pretty much idiot-proof when it came to parenting. Only genes, the vagaries of peer socializing, or extreme parental malfeasance could ruin them. Everything else, the experts maintained, came out in the wash.

Thomas disagreed. The small traumas lived like spiders in the emotional cracks of adulthood, catching what they could, and leaving the rest to larger predators. His parents had been poor and alcoholic, but his friends at school had come from relatively affluent households. He'd grown up ashamed, of his last-year's-hit-movie-lunch-box, of his Wal-Mart clothes, of his bruised-apple-instead-of-a-Twinkie. He'd grown up being quiet at lunch time.

Now shame tainted everything he owned. Everything 'mine'.

But as Mia would say, that was the whole point of economic freedom. Shame.

Those kids, though, he thought to himself. They were a different story.

Heartbreaking pride.

He rubbed his eyes, jumped when he glimpsed the shadow floating along the back of his house.

'Who-the—'

'Just me,' Mia called, holding up his own beer. 'Thought I'd join you for a drink.'

'Jesus, Mia,' Thomas gasped.

'Jumpy, aren't we?'

'Shush,' Thomas said, nodding to the pup-tent in the middle of the black yard. 'The kids just fell asleep.'

Mia nodded and laughed. 'They've been babbling about the great expedition for days now.'