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wasn’t one of us.
    We killed him. Somebody dropped a
Z
on a triple letter score. Mom had learned Arabic in the army, and she used one of those bullshit loanwords with a
Q
and no
U
. As the game went on, my brother and I started giving each other looks and smirking, and soon Mom joined in. By the end, the three of us were chuckling and Ray had gone silent. Mom beat Josh on the final turn. I finished third. Ray was a hundred points behind me.
    When the game was over, Mom went to check on the horses. Josh walked off holding his cell phone above his head to find a signal. Ray lit his pipe and refilled his cup of wine. I hadn’t been keeping track, but it wasn’t his first refill. He sat across the table and stared at me. When he spoke, I smelled the acrid tobacco on his breath.
    “I guess Scrabble’s not my game.”
    I shrugged. “I lost, too.” I felt bad for humiliating him. I rehashed all the things I’d told myself when I left her with him and moved away. He wasn’t the enemy. He was a good man, or good enough: a marine, a cop, a protector. He treated her well from what I’d seen. So what if he wasn’t good at Scrabble, if he got drunk once in a while?
    “Maybe I should have gone to college,” he said. I was looking toward the corrals, where shadow horses snorted and stomped, spooked by something they sensed in the night, and it took me a moment to realize that Ray was mocking me. I turned to him. His eyes were the color of shit. I’d seen this sour mood before, in other men, across other dinner tables. It was one of the first signs.
    I thought of my mother out there in the dark, and wonderedif she was watching us, if she was listening. She and I both knew that once the first battle began, there was no retreat. Apologies and retractions and promises were useless: in the end she’d have to choose between her man and her sons. In the past she’d always chosen us, but this time I wasn’t sure she would.
    I pretended that I hadn’t heard him and changed the subject. I asked what he was reading. I don’t remember what he said—maybe Melville—but it worked. We started talking books and we relaxed. The danger dissipated. Soon, over his shoulder, I saw my mother emerge from the darkness into the light of the fire. Another moment I come back to: I can still see her there, returning, her eyes rising to meet mine, the tiny smile, the shadows flickering across her face as she approached, reaching out a hand. I was so relieved to see her, as if she had been gone a long time. Her hand settled on Ray’s shoulder and squeezed. He looked at me, and in the dim light I thought I saw a smile play across his mouth. Maybe he thought that he had won.
    Josh and I never had our talk with Mom. From Gabaldon she and Ray left again, back onto the road, and we went home. We didn’t see Mom and Ray again for months, but the postcards they sent told us where they’d been: Springerville, Arizona; Corona, New Mexico; Corpus Christi, Texas; Memphis; Oklahoma City; Paducah, Kentucky, which the postcard says is “halfway between Possum Trot and Monkey’s Eyebrow”; Rapid City, South Dakota.
    Sometime in those next few months she sent me a letter postmarked from Saint Louis and return addressed to a national park in Missouri. Four sheets of paper from a yellow legal pad, both sides covered in her looping scrawl, and except for brief notes on postcards, they’re just about the only wordsshe ever wrote to me. Before she met Ray, we never stayed apart long enough to need the mail.
    She describes where she’s writing from, their campsite in the Mark Twain National Forest near Bourbon, Missouri. She’s sitting by a fire, writing in the light from a Coleman lantern and listening to country music on the radio. She says she’s happy.
We have hay for the horses food for us & our dogs and a pen and paper to write to my darling—the basics in life and honestly—Justin—I couldn’t be happier
. But after recounting their recent horseback