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help; she might as well spit on the flames. But she kept it there anyway. Seeing it made me wonder if she’d raised her hands to stop the bullets.
    Joe pointed at the fire extinguisher. “Might as well spray this.”
    “That’s a good idea,” I said. If the hay caught fire now, let it burn. There was nothing left to save.
    He handed me the extinguisher. I pulled the pin and tossed it into the brush. One last time I looked: the blue mountains in the distance, the brown valley spread beneath them, the crumbling buildings of Gleeson up the road, the trailer, the clearing full of footprints, the tinkling wind chime she’d hung from the rafters of the barn. Josh was right; we’d never come back here. I squeezed the handle and sprayed, circling the clearing until the extinguisher was empty. As I turned to leave, the powder had already begun to settle, covering our tracks.

SCRABBLE AT GABALDON

    After I moved away to college, my mother and Ray quit their jobs and sold the trailer where she and I had been living when they met. They said they were sick of working and wanted to travel. It wasn’t a surprise; she’d been in that trailer for two years, and that was longer than she liked to spend in one place. In the thirteen years we lived in Tombstone, we called a dozen places home: houses in town, trailers on the outskirts, a couple of apartments, and, of course, the houses and trailers and apartments of her boyfriends and husbands. It got to the point where I stopped hanging posters in my bedrooms and kept my things in boxes, ready to load up and move whenever she decided to sell or break up.
    Mom flipped a lot of property. She’d buy places and put them on the market again before we’d finished moving in, priced at ten percent higher than what she’d paid. She owned and ran five different businesses in Tombstone at one point or another. Her best friends were all real estate agents; she’d firstmet Bob and Connie when she bought a house from them. But it wasn’t just houses: she refused to settle on any place or anyone. When I was a kid, the constant moving and changing bothered me. I told myself that when I was on my own, I’d find a home and stick, put down roots. But in the decade since I left Tombstone, I’ve had a dozen different addresses.
    I hadn’t expected her to stay in the same place after I left. But when she and Ray both quit their jobs, sold the trailer, and hit the road, I asked the obvious questions. How long would they be gone? What would they do for money? Where would they live when they got back? She waved my questions off, said I was too square. They were leaving the normal world behind. They called it the Adventure, a name my brother and I mocked. We got battered postcards and staticky calls from the remote reaches of America. Every few months they’d swing back through Arizona to visit for special occasions, Josh’s graduation or my birthday. Their roaring, stinking diesel truck would show up in our driveway and they’d invade our house, set the dog loose in the backyard, take over our living room. For a weekend they’d complain about their self-imposed privation on the road and rave about how nice it was to have air-conditioning and running water. We’d eat a big dinner at a chain restaurant. Then they’d be off again.
    After months of this, Mom convinced Josh and me to come visit them. They were camping for a few weeks along the Mogollon Rim in eastern Arizona, and she called and begged us to drive up until we both relented. We packed warm clothes and loaded my truck and set off on the four-hour trip to someplace called Gabaldon with only Mom’s directions to guide us. On the drive, as we navigated the switchbacked mountain roads, Josh and I talked about how our mother had gone crazy.
    “I don’t know how long they think they can keep doing this,” Josh said. We were crossing a bridge at the bottom of asteep canyon somewhere in the Pinal Mountains, near Globe. Far above us, the sun