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Red Sox fan.
    “Sixteen? No kidding. Who won?”
    “Sox. Mo Vaughn hit a grand slam.”
    “No kid—”
    “Shut up, Norris,” Ruth snapped. She had the Mag-Lite trained on Sam’s face. He was squinting painfully, not liking it one bit but staying quiet. The light was bright and hid nothing. The eye was swollen almost closed and the skin around it looked as if it had been inflated and then injected with a black-and-purple dye. I looked away. “Norris,” Ruth said. “Go call the police.”
    “What?” I said. “Don’t do that.”
    “You take my son to a ballgame and bring him back looking like he’s been mugged. But he hasn’t been mugged, has he? No, he’s just been out with his good old dad. You’re sick, Dwight. You’ve got a problem and should be separated from the rest of us who don’t get a thrill beating the daylights out of our children. Go call the police, Norris.”
    “Norris,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
    “Ruth . . . ,” said Norris.
    “Mom, it was a dog,” Sam said.
    Everybody looked at him. And my son with his eggplant eye calmly reached up and pushed the Mag-Lite aside, so it was no longer blinding him. “We hit a dog, Mom. We killed it. It was terrible.”
    Ruth just stared at him. The expression on her face was a mix of so many things I remembered in her from our marriage: relief bordering on happiness; petty disappointment at having her moment stolen; anger at me that went, finally, way beyond words; a mother’s unbearable love for her son. After a moment she noticed the Mag-Lite beam shining uselessly across the lawn and switched it off. We settled into calmer waters, lit now by just the faint edge of porch light.
    “That doesn’t explain your eye.”
    “I got hit,” Sam said.
    “What?”
    “He means he was sleeping against the door,” I said quickly, “and got thrown into it when we hit the dog.”
    “Where was the dog?”
    Ruth was asking Sam, but he shook his head. He was ten and didn’t know the names of the roads too well. So Ruth reluctantly turned to me. “Where was it?”
    “Cantwell Road,” I said, naming a road about half an hour’s drive from Reservation Road. A road I was sure she knew: one afternoon years back, we’d pulled off Cantwell Road and made love in the car. That was fact. But if Ruth remembered the details of that day, she showed no sign of it.
    “What were you doing on Cantwell?”
    “Coming home from the game. Taking a new shortcut. Driving like hell, in fact, because, as I just told Norris here, it was extra innings.”
    “I’ll bet it was.”
    “It was, Mom,” Sam said.
    “Lay off, Ruth,” I said.
    “I’ll lay off when I’m good and ready. Your headlight’s busted.”
    “It was the dog,” Sam said.
    “That’s right,” I said. “I heard the light pop when we hit.”
    The Mag-Lite came on suddenly, found first me, then the front of my car, the busted right headlight. Ruth studying it all as if it was just another symptom of the mess my life had become after she’d stopped loving me.
    And then my heart nearly quit.
    I was standing about a yard from the front of the car. A tiny fragment of dark cloth, about the size of a dime, was caught on one of the shark’s teeth of glass along the rim of the crushed headlight. In my shock I half expected to find signs of the boy’s blood, too, but there weren’t any. I stole a look at Ruth, who was standing with Sam about ten feet away. But her expression—hard, reserved—was impossible to read.
    I waited.
    A moment later she switched off the Mag-Lite. I breathed again, hearing her say, “Poor thing.” Her tone was soft for the first time all evening. She had a great fondness for animals, dogs especially. When, the year after Sam was born, our first dog—a retriever named Sanford—died, Ruth had cried for three days straight.
    “It was black,” I said. “Good-sized. It ran right in front. There was nothing I could do, Ruth. I don’t really want to think about it.” I