“I also brought the forms from yesterday.”He produced a red folder and set it on her desk.“All done.Numbers five through nine.”
“You numbered them?”Cassidy blurted, peering at the folder he’d opened to show Rose.“That’s how Mom does it.”
“Itisyour mom's system,” Gray said.“She numbered the forms for me.I would already be lost if she hadn’t made me a master list and organized everything.”
Cassidy glanced at her mother with an arch expression that made Bonnie wince.Nine-year-olds weren’t supposed to know about attraction and crushes, were they?Surely not.And yet, Cassidy’s gaze was all too knowing as her daughter looked back and forth speculatively between her mother and Gray.
Yes.they both loved organization.But that didn’t automatically make them a match made in Heaven.It doesn’t hurt, though, Bonnie allowed.
She cleared a corner of her desk while Gray pulled up another chair.Noah installed himself beside Gray with his cheeseburger and question notebook and launched directly into interrogation mode.
“What's your favorite animal?”
“Functionally or aesthetically?”Gray replied.
Noah's brow furrowed.“What does aesthetically mean?”
“What it looks like versus what it does.”
“Oh.”Noah considered this for a moment.“Both.”
“Functionally, the tardigrade.It can survive in outer space, at the bottom of the ocean, and in a volcano.Aesthetically ...”He paused, thinking.“Probably the okapi.It looks as if someone built an animal out of leftover parts from other animals but somehow it works perfectly.”
Noah wrote both of these down.“What's a tardigrade?”
“A microscopic animal that looks like a tiny, eight-legged bear.It’s commonly called a water bear.”
“A WATER BEAR.”Noah’s mind was clearly blown.“Are they real?Can I pet one?Can Ihaveone as a pet?”
“Yes, they're real.But you can only see one under a microscope and you’d squish it if you tried to pet it.They're way too small to be a good pet, unfortunately.”
“Bummer.”Noah wrotewater bearin large letters and underlined it twice.“What about you, Cass?What’s your favorite animal.Functional and ascetically?”
“Aes-thet-ic-ally,” Cassidy pronounced slowly for Noah.“I choose the same animal for both.The octopus.”
Really?That surprised Bonnie.She’d assumed a nine-year-old girl would pick something fuzzy and cute like a cat or bunny.“Why an octopus?”she asked her daughter.
“They have three hearts and blue blood, and they're really smart.”
“That’s true,” Gray agreed.“They can solve surprisingly complex puzzles.And they have a completely different kind of intelligence than vertebrates.They're solitary animals, so they didn't evolve social intelligence the way primates did.The octopus developed along a totally separate path.”
“Convergent evolution,” Cassidy blurted.
Gray looked at her with sharp attention.“That's exactly right.Do you know much about it?”
“I read a book about it.The eye evolved independently something like forty times in different species.”She paused.“I thought that was interesting.The same solution but arrived at separately.”
“It's one of the most interesting concepts in biology,” Gray added.“The idea that certain solutions are so good Nature keeps re-inventing them even without knowing the other versions exist.”
Bonnie enjoyed watching her daughter talk with this man about convergent evolution over a picnic in her office.Something was loosening inside her.Unwinding.Like a knot that had been too tight to unravel for a long time but whose fibers were finally relaxing and letting go enough to untangle.
She’d had no idea that Cassidy knew about convergent evolution.She knew her daughter was bright and curious and read constantly, but the specifics of what was going on in her daughter’s busy mind were often opaque to her.Cassidy rarely volunteered to share what she knew.She had to be asked a specific question to get her talking.
Gray had asked the right question.On the first try.
“What do you want to be?”Noah asked Gray.“When you're done being a fireman.”
“I think I might like to keep doing some genetics work.Develop cattle breeding programs, maybe.Work on conservation genetics.A lot of species need help maintaining genetic diversity if they’re to survive.”
