Eight paintings were different from all the others. They were portraits of Tommy, 
rendered with a photographic realism equal to that with which the landscapes had been 
painted.
    Blinking in astonishment, he said, ‘When did you do these?’
    ‘Over the past two years. That’s how long I’ve been having dreams about you. I knew 
you were the one, my destiny, and then last night you just walked into the restaurant and 
ordered two cheeseburgers.’
    The living room in the Phan house in Huntington Beach was remarkably similar to the 
living room of the Dai House, although the furnishings were somewhat more expensive. A 
painting of Jesus, revealing His Sacred Heart, hung on one wall, and in a corner was a 
Buddhist shrine.
    Mother Phan sat in her favourite armchair, slack-jawed and pale, having taken the 
news of the wedding as though she had been hit in the face with a skillet.
    Scootie licked one of her hands consolingly, but she didn’t seem to be aware of the 
dog.
    Del sat on the sofa with Tommy, holding his hand. ‘First, Mrs. Phan, I want you to 
understand that the Payne’s and the Phan’s could be the most wonderful combination of 
families imaginable, a tremendous union of talents and forces, and my mother and I are 
prepared to embrace all of you as our own. I want to be given a chance to love you and 
Mr. Phan and Tommy’s brothers, and I want all of you to learn to love me.’
    ‘You steal my son,’ said Mother Phan.
    ‘No,’ Del said, ‘I stole a Honda and later a Ferrari, and then we borrowed the 
Peterbilt that the demon stole, but I didn’t steal your son. He gave his heart to me of 
his own free will. Now before you say anything more that might be rash, that you might 
later come to regret having said, let me tell you about my mother and me.’
    ‘You bad news.’
    Ignoring the insult, Del said, ‘Twenty-nine years ago, when my Mom and Dad were 
driving from Vegas to a poker tournament in Reno, taking a scenic route, they were 
abducted by aliens from a lonely stretch of highway near Mud Lake in Nevada.’
    Gazing at Del, his head ringing like a gong with remembered lines of conversation 
that had seemed like sheer lunacy when she had spoken them, Tommy said, ‘South of 
Tonopah.’
    ‘That’s right, darling,’ said Del. To Tommy’s mother, she said, ‘They were taken up 
to the mothership and examined. They were allowed to remember all of this, you see, 
because the aliens who abducted them were good extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, most of 
the abductions are perpetrated by evil ET’s whose plans for this planet are nefarious in 
the extreme, which is why they block abductees’ memories of what happened.’
    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.’
    Tommy couldn’t read the wrenching series of emotions that passed across his mother’s