Free Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain Page A

by the carport where I’d said goodbye to her. I didn’t recognize the cars parked there now. Somebody else lived there, strangers sleeping in our old rooms and eating in the kitchen where we’d shared the terrible pot roasts my mother cooked. It didn’t seem right that it had been wiped clean like that, that we had been forgotten. I thought a place should have a memory.
    Inside Bob and Connie’s house I took a plate and filled it with food I wouldn’t eat and sat on the couch. Everyone was talking about the murder, the troubles with the will and life insurance. Connie and Bob had known my mother better than anyone in the last years of her life. Connie was my mother’s realtor and best friend, a gentle woman but one who got things done. Bob was a cowboy, a real one, not a poser like Ray: he’d worked on ranches as a young man, been a command sergeant major in the army, served in three different wars. He and mymother had the kind of warm platonic relationship she sometimes had with men like him—strong, kind, respectful men, men with nothing to prove—while she was running off and marrying their opposites. Bob had found her body.
    Somebody mentioned Mom’s horses. Connie pointed out the sliding glass door of their living room toward the corrals, where a small herd of horses stood swishing their tails, but instead I stared out into their backyard, where my mother had married Ray.
    Among the things we’d taken from the trailer where she died was their homemade wedding guestbook: a few sheets of computer paper folded in half and bound by two crooked staples. The cover has their names, the date and place—
Debbie & Ray, May 13, 2001, Tombstone, AZ
—and a picture of the bride and groom sitting in front of a blooming rosebush in Bob and Connie’s yard. The photo was taken with an early digital camera and printed on cheap paper, and the lighting is odd: sunlight bathes the rosebush and yard in the background, but Mom and Ray sit in shadow in the foreground. The picture looks almost fake, grainy and washed-out, the edges of their bodies strangely sharp against the brightness beyond. Ray wears a straw cowboy hat and his beard hides his unsmiling mouth; he never smiled for pictures, was always playing the tough guy. His eyes are slitted and inscrutable.
    My mother wears earrings, thick gold hoops. That seems out of character; she rarely wore earrings. I wonder if she wore them because she was getting married, or if I remember wrong, if I never knew her as well as I thought, if she was a slate on which I wrote my own assumptions, as so many people are. The tiny line of gold below her neck is the crucifix she always wore; that I do remember. I can’t tell what her T-shirtsays: the first two words are visible, above a silhouette of horses and cowboys:
I’m a
. I’m a what? The smile on her face seems strained, but it’s hard to say for sure.
    The guestbook has ten pages. Seven are blank. The other three contain a half-dozen scrawled signatures I don’t recognize, the laboriously printed names of my young cousins, and brief notes from Tom, my brother, and me. Tom wrote crookedly in letters of varying sizes:
Good Luck Always
. Josh added:
Congratulations & Best Wishes!!! Love Always
. I wrote:
Mom, it’s wonderful to see you so happy. You deserve it
.
    I don’t remember much of the ceremony. I’d been to weddings involving both of my parents before, and they run together in my memory. I got dressed up, which, for a backyard wedding in Tombstone, the fifth wedding for the bride and the second for the groom, meant I wore a shirt with a collar. Josh wore a suit and tie even though he knew nobody else would, which was typical of him: Mom liked to tell stories of him as a boy, putting on a blazer to play in the street. My mother wore an off-white dress, and I think Ray wore a brown sport coat and jeans, although I have to rely on my memory, because the photos from that day were in the bloodstained album I left by the bed