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“What is it, Cassie?” Sammy. Five. Adorable. Big brown teddy-bear eyes, clutching the other member of the family with big brown eyes, the stuffed one I now have stowed in the bottom of my backpack.
“Why are you crying?”
Seeing my tears got his started.
I brushed past him, headed for the room of the sixteen-year-old human dinosaur, Cassiopeia Sullivanus extinctus. Then I went back to him. I couldn’t leave him crying like that. We’d gotten pretty tight since Mom got sick. Nearly every night bad dreams chased him into my room, and he’d crawl in bed with me and press his face against my chest, and sometimes he forgot and called me Mommy.
“Did you see them, Cassie? Are they coming?”
“No, kiddo,” I said, wiping away his tears. “No one’s coming. ”
Not yet.
11
MOM DIED ON A T