BooksBarbecue
Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
  1. :01
  2. :02
  3. :03
  4. :04
  5. :05
  6. :06
  7. :07
  8. :08
  9. :09
  10. :10
  11. :11
  12. :12
  13. :13
  14. :14
  15. :15
  16. :16
  17. :17
  18. :01
  19. :02
  20. :03
  21. :04
  22. :05
  23. :06
  24. :07
  25. :08
  26. :09
  27. :10
  28. :11
  29. :12
  30. :13
  31. :01
  32. :02
  33. :03
  34. :04
  35. :05
  36. :06
  37. :07
  38. :08
  39. :09
  40. :10
  41. :11
  42. :12
  43. :13
  44. :14
  45. :15
  46. :16
  47. :00
  48. :01
  49. :02
  50. :03
  51. :04
  52. :05
  53. :06
  54. :07
  55. :08
  56. :09
  57. :10
  58. :11
  59. :12
  60. :13
  61. :14
  62. :15
  63. :16
  64. :17
  65. :18
  66. :19
  67. 3:46 a.m.

Nearly two months after Conner Sullivan was exonerated from Jessie’s murder, my phone rang. It was 3:33 a.m. It was President Sullivan. He couldn’t sleep and needed someone to talk to. I was the only person he knew for certain was awake. For ten minutes we made small talk about the weather, his beloved Redskins, and how long I let myself sit on the pot. A month later he called again. And two weeks after that he showed up on my doorstep with a six-pack of beer. He knew I played poker with my dad each Wednesday and wanted to know if he could crash our game.

So my dad, me, the President, and Red (the head of the President’s Secret Service detail) played poker for forty-nine minutes.

But I hadn’t heard from him in three months.

Blasted Ukraine.

I decide to watch fifteen more minutes of Game of Thrones, then go for a short walk with Lassie.

I am set to hit the play button when an alert comes in that I have a new email.

It is 3:10 a.m.

[email protected] doesn’t get much action, mostly from Amazon or the online trading podcast I subscribe to, and I’ve only received a handful of emails while I was awake.

The email is from AST. Advanced Surveillance and Tracking.

The email is only three words.

We found her.

I take a deep breath.

They found my mother.

:02

The last memory I have of my mother is on my sixth birthday. I remember being excited because she missed the previous two. The moment I woke up, I searched the room for her, but it was only my dad standing over me.

“Where’s mom?”

“She’s . . .”

This sentence always ended the same.

“. . . working.”

My mom had the most boring job in the world. Or at least, when I was little, I remember thinking a geologist was the most boring job in the world. But that was because I viewed her job — rocks — as competition. Why was sandstone more important than me? What did quartzite have that I didn’t? It wasn’t until I grew up, learned that my mother wasn’t spending those three-week to three-month long stretches looking for rocks, that I understood. She was looking for oil. Companies paid her a lot of money to do this, which allowed my dad to stay home, earn a modest living as a technical writer, and care after me.

“. . . right there,” he’d finished.

My mother came into the room holding a birthday cake. The cake was of Snoopy and it had a big blue number six candle on it.

I can still see the look on my mother’s face. Her sharp and angular features — nearly the opposite of my father’s — were a billboard of her Czech heritage. She had piercing green eyes — little pieces of jade, she’d called them — that must be what mood rings were made of.