His pop looked surprised.  Baldwin  No problem with that.

 Thanks.

Kit brought his plate into the living room, where he sat down on the floor and watched his mother change channels one more time.  Well,that s pretty,  she said, sounding relieved.

Kit glanced up at the screen, chewing.  Uh, Mama,  he said,  I m probably too young to be watching anything that explicit.

Her eyes widened.  But, honey, it s just a big cloud of gas, or smoke, or   She stopped, her eyes widening even more, then changed the channel six times in a row without stopping.

Kit grinned and turned his attention back to the chicken.

Investigations

Circuses even just the thought of them had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she had felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the processions of elephants parading along trunk-by-tail, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns.

Yet it hadn t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer  nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she d begged her parents to take her home.Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.