“Thanks. We will. Merry Christmas, everybody,” Beth said.

“Merry Christmas,” we all echoed into the phones.

“I’ll be waiting at the airport. I love you all.”

“And we love you,” my mother said.

“We love you,” my father repeated. “We’ll see you next week.”

“Bye-bye, Beth,” I said. “And wish Tadpole a merry Christmas, too.”

“Bye, Sam. Bye, Mom and Dad.”

After we’d all hung up, I wandered to my parents’ room. My mother was crying and my father had an arm around her shoulders.

“She’s okay,” I said. “She’s fine.”

“I know,” my mother blubbered. “It’s just…just…you won’t understand until your children grow up and leave home.”

“First off, who knows if I’m even going to have children. And second, maybe I’m never going to leave home myself.”

“Promise?” she asked.

I jumped onto their bed. “I promise. But you might regret it. Someday you might want me to move to the other side of the country.”

She wrapped an arm around me. “Never.”

CHAPTER FIVE

It had taken me a long time to get back to sleep after Beth’s call. Partly that had to do with being woken up in the middle of the night, but partly it was because, as far as my body was concerned, it wasn’t really the middle of the night, it was early evening. I always found the time change a bit difficult to adjust to. And as soon as I got myself oriented to local time, it would be time to go back home and start the whole thing over again. That was one of the disadvantages of coming this far for such a short break—but a short holiday was better than no holiday at all. I was going to come here every year, forever. Even when I was married and when I had kids and they had kids and—I was getting a little ahead of myself. Maybe I should wait until I got kissed for the first time before I started planning my wedding!

I made my way down to the beach and looked around. It was still early in the day, before the midday sun would drive us all to shelter and shade, so there was a crowd. There were the older, grandparent types, young couples walking hand in hand, and families with little kids—I didn’t see any potential brides to propose to.

Sometimes when I looked at a girl I didn’t just think about who she was and whether she was cute, I thought about what was inside of her. And I don’t mean what sort of person she was, but what was really inside, in her genetic code. What was hidden deep beneath the surface in her DNA? Things that you couldn’t tell by looking, things that she didn’t even know were inside of her but which might change her life, and the life of anybody who was married to her.

MS—Multiple Sclerosis—was somewhere in my mother’s genetic programming. Luckily for me, though it was genetic, it wasn’t inherited. She didn’t get it from her parents. That meant that neither Beth nor I was any more likely to have it than anybody else. We didn’t carry that DNA time-bomb inside of us. Not that we couldn’t have something else. Who knew what diseases or conditions anybody carried? It was just a gamble. And marriage itself was such a gamble—half of my friends had divorced parents. It made the whole marriage thing look like a real long shot.