Free Survival of the Fittest by Jonathan Kellerman

other—at least I know I loved him. But it was more of a—I don’t want to say family obligation. More of a .   .   . general bond. A feeling. And I loved his good qualities.”
    She crumpled the tissue. The first thing she’d done upon arriving was hand me insurance forms. Then she’d talked about the coverage, the demands of her job—taking time to get around to Nolan.
    “Good qualities,” I said.
    “His energy. He had a real—” She laughed. “I was actually going to say “love for life.’ His energy and his intelligence. When he was young—eight or nine—the school tested him because he was goofing off in class. Turned out he was highly gifted—something like the top half-percent and he’d been tuning out because he was bored. I’m not stupid, but I’m not even remotely in that league   .   .   . maybe I’m the lucky one.”
    “Being gifted was a burden for him?”
    “It’s crossed my mind. Because Nolan didn’t have much patience and I think that had to do with his intelligence.”
    “No patience for people?”
    “People, things, any process that moved too slowly. Once again, this was back when he was a teenager. He may have mellowed when he was older. I remember him always railing about something. Mom telling him, “Honey, you can’t expect the world to go at your pace,—could that be why he became a cop? To fix things fast?”
    “If he did that could have been a problem, Helena. There are very few fast fixes in cop work. Just the opposite: Cops see problems that never get solved. Last time you said something about conservative political views. That could have led him to police work.”
    “Maybe. Although, once again, that’s the last phase I knew about. He could have been into something completely different.”
    “He changed philosophies often?”
    “All the time. There were times he outliberaled Mom and Dad, radical, really. Just about a Communist. Then he swung back the other way.”
    “Was all this in high school?”
    “I think it was after the satanic phase—probably his senior year. Or maybe his freshman year in college. I remember his reading Mao’s Little Red Book, reciting from it at the table, telling Mom and Dad they thought they were progressive but they were really counterrevolutionary. Then for a while he got into Sartre, Camus, all that existential stuff, the meaninglessness of life. One month he tried to prove it by not bathing or changing his clothes.” She smiled. “That ended when he decided he still liked girls. The next phase was .   .   . I think it was Ayn Rand. He read Atlas Shrugged and got totally into individualism. Then anarchy, then libertarianism. Last I heard he’d decided Ronald Reagan was a god, but we hadn’t talked politics for years so I don’t know where he ended up.”
    “Sounds like adolescent searching.”
    “I guess it was, but I never went through it. Always middle-of-the-road. The boring child.”
    “How’d your parents react to Nolan’s changes?”
    “They were pretty cool about it. Tolerant. I don’t think they really ever understood Nolan but I never saw them put him down.” She smiled. “Sometimes it was funny—the passion he put into each new phase. But we never made fun.”
    She crossed her legs.
    “Maybe the reason I never went through any of that was I felt Nolan was so unpredictable that I owed it to Mom and Dad to be stable. Sometimes it did seem that the family was divided into two segments: the three of us, and Nolan. I always felt close to my parents.”
    She swiped at her eyes with the tissue. “Even when I was in college I’d go places with them, go out to dinner with them. Even after I was married.”
    “And Nolan wasn’t part of that?”
    “Nolan stopped hanging out with us when he was twelve. He always preferred to be by himself, do his own thing. Now that I think about it, he always kept his life private.”
    “Alienated?”
    “I guess so. Or maybe he just preferred his own