Mother Phan scowled at Tommy. “You rude to Mrs. Dai, won’t even stay for tea, run off and marry crazy woman.” She discovered Scootie licking her hand, and she shooed him away. “You want lose tongue, you filthy dog?”
“Anyway, in the mothership, hovering above Mud lake,” Del continued, “the aliens took an egg from my mother, sperm from Daddy, added some genetic wizardry of their own, and implanted mother with an embryo—which was me. I am a starchild, Mrs. Phan, and my mission here is to ferret out damage done by certain other extraterrestrials—which often includes teaching people like Mrs. Dai to perform evil mojo—and set things right. Because of this, I lead an eventful life, and often a lonely one. But at last not lonely anymore, because I have Tommy.”
“World full of lovely Vietnamese girls,” Tommy’s mother told him, “and you run away with crackpot maniac blonde.”
“When I reached puberty,” Del said, “I began to acquire various extraordinary powers, and I suppose I might continue to acquire even more as the years go by.”
Tommy said, “So that’s what you meant when you said you’d have been able to save your father if he hadn’t gotten cancer before you reached puberty.”
Squeezing his hand, Del said, “It’s all right. Fate is fate. Death is just a phase, just a transition between this and a higher existence.”
“The David Letterman show.”
Grinning, Del said, “I love you, tofu man.” Mother Phan sat as stone-faced as an Easter Island monument.
“And Emmy, the little girl… the daughter of the guard at the gatehouse,” Tommy said. “You have cured her.”
“And gave you a massage on the carousel that means you’ll never need to sleep again.”
He raised one hand to the back of his neck, and as his heart began to race with exhilaration, he remembered the tingle of her fingers as they had probed his weary muscles.
She winked. “Who wants to sleep when we could use all that time to consummate?”
“Don’t want you here,” said Mother Phan. Turning to her mother-in-law again, Del said, “When the aliens returned Mom and Daddy to that highway south of Tonopah, they sent along one of their own as a guardian, in the form of a dog.”
Tommy would have thought that nothing on earth could have torn his attention away from Del at that moment, but he turned his head to Scootie so fast that he almost gave himself whiplash.
The dog grinned at him.
“Scootie,” Del explained, “has greater powers than I do—”
“The flock of birds that distracted the demon,” Tommy said.
“—and with your indulgence, Mrs. Phan, I will ask him to give a little demonstration to confirm what I’ve told you.”
“Insane crazy American maniac blond lunatic” Mother Phan insisted.
The Labrador sprang onto the coffee table, ears pricked, tail wagging, and gazed so intently at Mother Phan that she pressed back into her armchair in alarm.
Above the dog’s head, a sphere of soft orange light formed in the air. It hung there a moment, but when Scootie twitched one ear, the light spun away from him and whirled around the room. When it passed an open door, the door flew shut. When it passed a closed door, the door flew open. All the windows rose as if flung up by invisible hands, and balmy November air blew into the living room. A clock stopped ticking, unlighted lamps glowed, and the television switched on by itself.
The sphere of light returned to Scootie, hovered over his head for a moment, and then faded away.
Now Tommy knew how Del had started the yacht without keys and how she had hot-wired the Ferrari in two seconds flat.
The black Labrador got off the coffee table and padded to his mistress, putting his head on her lap.
To Tommy’s mother, Del said, “We’d like you and Mr. Phan and Tommy’s brothers and their wives, all his nieces and nephews, to come to our party tonight in Las Vegas and celebrate our marriage. We can’t fit you all in the LearJet, but Mother has leased a 747, which is standing by at the airport right now, and if you hurry, you can all be there with us tonight. It’s time for me to quit my job as a waitress and get on with my real work. Tommy and I are going to lead eventful lives, Mrs. Phan, and we’d like all of you to be a part of that.”