“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said to him one night, during a rare moment when they were alone in the little room. A typically bland letter had arrived from the Wilsons (or rather from Homer, for none of the others ever sent any word to them at all). The girls had gone out soon after the reading and Hiro had wandered out in their wake, already tapping his pipe against his palm. She knew that Ray too would leave the room in a moment, following them into the failing day, the light planing down to such an angle that it seemed to skate along the blasted surface of the desert like a stone skipping on the flat of a pond. She wondered where he went, her eldest, her only boy, his thoughts already an enigma to her. Had that always been the case or had she lost him somewhere along the way?

“I’m fine, Mom,” he told her.

“I know you,” she said. “I know when you’re fine.”

He did not say what she thought he would, did not tell her again that he was “fine” or “all right” or “okay” or any of the other bland Americanisms that made her feel like she was talking to the radio rather than her flesh and blood. “It’s just that . . . ,” he began, pausing for a moment and then saying, “It’s just that I kinda thought Jimmy and Helen might, you know, write to us too once in a while.”

“You miss your friends,” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

“Maybe their father doesn’t want them to?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

She shrugged. “Embarrassed. I don’t know.”

“Why would he be embarrassed?”

“I don’t really have to answer that for you, do I?” she said.

“But she’s—” He cut himself off, starting again with a kind of choking that his mother did not recognize at first but then saw for what it was: her son (her grown son, a man) was on the verge of tears. “I mean they’re, you know, my best friends.”

“You said she,” his mother said then.

“What?”

“You said she at first. That’s what you said.”

“I just meant both of them.”

“Did you?”

Then he said something so quietly that she had to lean in to catch his words and even then, when he repeated them, they were but a blur of sound.

“I want to go home.” Then he was up out of the chair and out the door.