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“What’s with you?” he said. “The emotional oven got set to Low?”
“I like to keep the worlds separate.”
“What we do and your normal shrink stuff—oxymoron though that may be?”
I laughed.
He said, “Emotion, finally—hold on, Alicia just walked in, has a look on her face.”
Muffled conversation for a few moments, then he came back on.
“What’s that thing you explained to young Aaron? Making assumptions before enough info comes in?”
“Sampling error.”
“Just happened. Mona Kramm didn’t know it but Caspian’s got another sib. Younger sister who lives in Albuquerque. She uses hermarried name, Ionnides, which is why she didn’t come up initially. But God bless Alicia, she kept rooting and found a joint obituary for both parents inThe Columbus Dispatch.”
I said, “The parents died a couple of years apart.”
“Maybe the kids did a twofer to save dough. The sister—Katie—is a cook at a chicken joint, so no trust fund.”
Or Bankster family dynamics had been interesting.
I said, “How’d she react to Caspian’s death?”
“She got pretty overwhelmed, couldn’t talk anymore, said she’d call back later. To my surprise, she did but just to tell me she had to work, her break was at noon. You wanna listen in or is thenormalstuff intruding on your schedule?”
“Nothing normal until tomorrow,” I said.
“Wish I could say that.”
—
I was at his office by a quarter to twelve.
He said, “Your crack about if I could see you, you’d be kneeling got me thinking. Why not a face-to-face? I emailed Katie and asked if we could do it on FaceTime and she said sure. Any cyber-shrink tips?”
I said, “Nope. Good thinking, you’ll have access to nonverbal cues.”
“The remote thing, think it could ever take off for you guys?”
“Tele-therapy?” I said. “It’s already done when face-to-face isn’t possible.”
“And…”
“It wouldn’t work for a lot of my work. Getting down and playing with kids and being there to reassure them. Talking to adults remotely is better than nothing. But personal contact’s a big thing for humans and other species.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Can’t see any reason for it to become the next big thing. But who knows? We might even get those flying cars the experts have been predicting for what, seventy years?”
I said, “Wait long enough, anyone can be an expert.”
He half swiveled toward the screen. “You feeling like being on-screen?”
“If you want me to ask questions I should be.”
“Okay, let me fool with this.” Tilting the screen. Activating the app. Tilting again.
The resulting small box in the lower right corner was nearly filled by his big pale face, with mine occupying a sliver. He adjusted some more, tried to fit both of us in, ended up with two half-faces.
