“The relatives told Sara that Abraham was clinically insane and she had no obligation to go along. But Sara decided to drop out with Abraham. Maybe she was bored in Ur. Maybe she didn’t want to listen to everyone talk about her crazy husband and how the guy who’d looked so great wasn’t such a catch after all. Maybe she worried about what would happen to him if she didn’t go take care of him.”

“May-be she loved him,” I say.

“Could be,” Willie agrees.

“Maybe.” Sara obviously doesn’t favor my theory. “I don’t know why she went, but she did.

“They spent years wandering—all over nowhere. A couple of times, Abraham saw his bush again. Sara never saw it, but she stayed with him anyway. She stayed even when he got a slave woman pregnant, and even when he offered to give Sara—and I mean ‘give’ her in the Biblical sense—to another traveler. He did that twice, in fact, even after God sent an angel to tell him to stop it. Sara stayed, because by then she had no home to go back to. She had no children to take care of her.

“One day, when Sara was ninety years old, an angel of the Lord came to deliver a message from God. The angel told Sara she was going to have a baby, and be the Mother of Nations.

“Guess what Sara did then.”

I don’t know. We all look at one another. No one knows.

“She laughed. She laughed right in the face of a messenger of the Lord.

“Nine months later, the Lord got the last laugh. Or almost. Sara, age ninety-plus, gave birth to a baby boy. She named him Isaac. That was really the last laugh. In Hebrew, Isaac means ‘we laugh.’ I’ve always been pleased that I have that woman’s name.”

I look back and see that Carole has joined us. She is pushing a piece of wayward red hair behind her ear, squinting in the sun, laughing in her way, I think. “Willie, you know your cabin’s out front looking for you?”

*   *   *

Sue stands with her feet firmly planted on the floor. She’s in charge of indoor sports. “Okay, you two. Tell me what y’all want to play.” The others are already playing games with one of the boys’ cabins.

“Scrabble?” Sara asks me.

“You can play Scrabble at home,” Sue says.

Sara scratches her head. “Is that a good reason not to play it here? Am I missing something?”

I shrug. Scrabble would be fun; we do play it at home, and I always impress everyone by keeping score in my head. But Scrabble isn’t on the program. I look around at CPs and MRs throwing horseshoes in the general direction of the spike and lurching around the shuffleboard courts.