BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

I’ve thought about that night for twelve straight years, and while I can’t always remember how my mother looked, I’ll never forget the way her face collapsed or how the back of her head had simply vanished, leaving behind chunks of broken skull that clung to flaps of hair-covered skin. I’ll never forget the spray of blood that hovered in the air above her like a misty cloud, or the way her brain came apart and left a trail on the floor behind her, and certainly not the way she had dropped, crumpling straight down and coming to rest in a busted heap. Those things I’m doomed to always remember. And all of it done by a bullet I myself had loaded earlier that very same day, the only bullet that was left. If only I had used them all up, or hadn’t loaded the gun at all, or even something as simple as battling the heat without the fans so I could’ve heard them arguing sooner, then maybe she’d still be alive today. I had felt it in my bones that something would happen and yet I allowed myself to be talked out of it. And because of that, my mother was killed. That is the fact I must live with. But despite the result and of all the images that will forever haunt me, I’m left with one that will always soothe. My mother and I had shared a moment together, or rather, we had owned it, for when our eyes met, everything ceased to exist but us. Just the two of us, together, if only for the fraction of a second. At least we were given that much.

She had been having an affair for several months and was planning to leave my father. I don’t know how he found out about it. Nobody ever figured it out, not even the police. The other man was an attorney she had met at the grocery store. He was tall and handsome with dark hair and eyes, a few years older than she. I sat watching from the back of the courtroom as he took the stand at the end of the trial, hating him with everything inside of me. And when the verdict was read—life imprisonment with the possibility of parole—I stole a gun from Jason’s father’s cabinet and went to the man’s house, the attorney’s, and snuck onto his property with every intention of killing him.