“Yeah.”

He sighs. “I miss her too. It’s weird. Every now and then something completely random will remind me of her. About how she was completely convinced Bigfoot was real. Or that she was sure Elvis was still alive and living in West Virginia.”

I chuckle. “She loved that old black-and-white tabloid. What was it called? The one that said stuff about how a woman was pregnant with a yeti’s baby or that aliens had formed a colony in a Pennsylvania man’s backyard.”

“Weekly World News.”

“That’s it. I don’t think they even print it anymore. It went out of business a few years back, I think.”

“Oh man,” he says. “Could you imagine if she’d still been around when that happened? She would have flipped.”

“She would have made all of us participate in a letter campaign,” I say. “Writing letters to the publisher about why the tabloid should still be printed.”

“All the while discussing her own alien experiences,” Dom says. “Hers and Joseph’s.”

“God love him. Did you know she had a kid? A daughter, I think.”

“No.” He sounds surprised. “Where is she?”

“She died. A long time ago. Before we ever knew her. I don’t know how old she was or what happened. But I know she was young, and I think she got sick somehow. I never asked because I didn’t want to hurt her. I only asked her name.”

“What was it?”

“Arlene. Arlene Paquinn.”

Dom is quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s why she found you guys, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

He flexes his fingers on the steering wheel. Outside, shadowed trees roll by. We’re either in Utah or we’ve crossed into Idaho. I don’t know which. “She lost her family,” he says. “You and Bear had yours taken from you. You all fit together because you needed to. And then Creed and Anna came. And Otter. You made your own out of what you were given.”

“And you.” Because his family had been taken from him in the most horrible way. We folded him in like it was nothing. Like he was supposed to be there. It’s hard to remember a time when he wasn’t.

“And me,” he says. “Yeah. You made me a part of this.”

“Those ants.”

“Helmholtz Watson.” A small smile.

“I was scared of you,” I say, “when I first saw you.”

“Were you?” He sounds bemused.

“You were so big.”

“And you were just a little guy.”

“You had stars on your shoes. Little stars you’d drawn on them, and I thought they were the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”

“You talked,” he says. “And talked. And talked. I wondered just how someone so little could talk so much. But that was okay, because I didn’t talk that much at all… to anyone.”

“I’d never had a friend before,” I confess. “Not really. Not someone I could call just my friend. I was so worried.”

“About what?”

“That you were going to think I was this little kid who wasn’t cool and knew too much about the dumbest things. Who wanted you to be a vegetarian just because I was. Who still had to get into a bathtub when there were earthquakes. Who acted far more mature than his age just to hide how scared he was.”