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four-bedroom split-level in Fairfax, while Sherry bought a showplace in Georgetown, an address commensurate with her newfound ego. That Scott would live with Brandon was a foregone conclusion; none of them even questioned it.
    Until the attorneys got involved, and Sherry suddenly discovered her long-lost maternal instincts. She sued for sole custody initially, but then the thought of actually winning must have frightened her, because within a week, she’d changed it to joint custody.
    Child-sharing, Brandon called it. Like job-sharing, or ride-sharing. All about Sherry’s convenience, without a lot of consideration for what’s best for Scott. Brandon refused.
    No, he declared, it would be sole custody with visitation rights, and he, Brandon, would be primary custodian. Twenty-eight thousand dollars in legal fees later, it all boiled down to this: If Brandon relinquished rights to their marital stock investments—about $3 million—Sherry would go along with his custodial demands, provided her child support payments would never exceed $1,500 a month, even during the college years. Brandon signed the papers without two seconds’ negotiation.
    For the price of a Georgetown showplace, Sherry O’Toole had sold her son. If Brandon hadn’t been so ecstatic, he might have felt sorry for her.
    So, Brandon and Scott became Team Bachelor, and they’d gotten by pretty damned well these past six years. Granted, they ate a lot more frozen dinners than they probably should, but they ate most of them together, and Brandon would bet bucks against buttons that he knew more about his kid’s friends and activities than ninety percent of the two-parent families on the block. Brandon worried sometimes what would happen in another two years when he found the nest empty. Who was he going to talk to? How was he going to stay plugged in to what was going on in the community? How was he going to deal with the loneliness?
    Thank God it was only a week. Meanwhile, if he really needed a reminder of his son’s presence, he needed only to look around the family room. As Brandon crossed to the kitchen, it took real effort not to step on some bit of mess that Scott had left behind: two pairs of socks that he could see, three pairs of shoes and a week’s worth of dishes and glasses. For all their strength and bonding, Team Bachelor shared not a whit of housekeeping talent. Brandon was a borderline slob in his own right, but Scott made Oscar Madison look like Martha Stewart. The boy was a mess-making machine, and totally oblivious to it.
    Of course, Brandon could have just cleaned it all up himself, but what was the point in that? Team Bachelor succeeded because of their commitment to cooperative independence. Long-term survival depended on each pulling his own weight. As it was, Scott’s vision of the universe held himself at the center of everything, with all the world’s resources focused solely on his personal needs. The less Brandon did to promote the fantasy, the better.
    He put the mail on the counter under the telephone, noting with a sigh the blinking red 8 on the answering machine. Knowing that none of the messages were for him, he pushed the button and went about the business of nuking himself a Lean Cuisine. Chicken Teriyaki. What the hell, maybe he’d nuke two.
    The first message featured Scott’s just-a-friend-not-a-girlfriend-even-though-I-spend-my-life-on-the-phone-with-her buddy, Rachel. She wanted to make sure that he had a nice trip, and that he knew she was thinking about him. Oh, and she really hoped that he’d use the trip as a means to learn to get along with Sherry.
    The second message was from one of Scott’s band buddies at Robinson High School announcing a change in the rehearsal schedule.
    Three and four were more words of encouragement from Rachel, first apologizing for meddling in Scott’s relationship with his mother, because she knew how tough a time he had with that sometimes, chased fifteen minutes later by a