The headstone was a solid mass of black granite, no engravings. It was rounded at the top like a little door, and it leaned a bit to the left, not unlike the door to our house, whose foundation had shifted over the years. For a while, I fired at that crooked headstone, the slingshot’s rubber pull cracking in the cold, and I worried I’d snap it, but I had to let those balls fly. I missed maybe ten times before I found my groove and couldn’t miss, kept blasting one after the other until the metal balls were gone. I tried to find them in the snow around the headstone, but they were buried. The stone had not one dent.

I made my way back home, and our house’s chimney smoke coiled into the sky.

Inside, Frick was still sitting at the kitchen table, face hard, his hand wrapped around the same cup of wine he’d been drinking when I left. He stared up the hallway at Mom, who came out of her bedroom—or maybe he had been staring up that straight hallway, and he seemed to look at her only because there she was, eyes bloodshot, swollen. Mom went to the kitchen sink and started on the dishes, a few of which we’d eaten pasta and eggs off of last week.

“What’s for dinner?” I said, hoping the answer could put us back together for just a moment.

But before Mom could speak, Frick said, “Whatever you killed with that slingshot.”

He wouldn’t look at me and stayed staring at Mom. I remember wanting to say it was just a graveyard, a headstone, but I felt it was more than that.

Frick looked over his shoulder at me, looked at my empty hands. “Not even a chipmunk?” When he laughed his double chin popped out, revealing his wine-red teeth.

“Leave him be,” Mom said.

A chipmunk diet would be good for you, I thought, and right as the thought smoked out of my brain, Frick rose in a way that made Mom and me look at him, like he was about to take the slingshot from my hands and throw it away or commit a darker, unforgettable thing.

His hair was unbraided, the way it always was when he drank in the early morning. “I’m going to check on camp,” he said.

Mom didn’t say anything while he laced up his boots. I turned on the TV in the living room. I didn’t hear the back door close but I heard his truck start and groan. For a while, I heard the sink still running, and Frick’s truck was still grumbling in place in the driveway. I wondered why he hadn’t left yet, and so I looked through the living room window at the truck. Mom was standing at the driver’s-side window, looking sorry. Over my shoulder, in the kitchen, drops of water dotted the linoleum from the sink to the open back door.

Finally, with Mom hanging from the window, Frick backed the truck up and yanked her along with him until Mom let go and fell to the ground. On her knees, she was crying and watching him as he put the truck in drive and pulled away.