Roadside Crosses

twelve-year-old Wes appear too, looking their way. He was hanging back, in the doorway. And he wasn’t smiling.
    Her stomach did a flip. After his father’s death, Wes could be counted on to take a dislike to the men that his mom saw socially—sensing them, her therapist said, as a threat to their family and to his father’s memory. The only man he really liked was Michael O’Neil—in part because, the doctor theorized, the deputy was married and thus no risk.
    The boy’s attitude was hard for Dance, who’d been a widow for two years, and at times felt a terrible longing for a romantic companion. She wanted to date, she wanted to meet somebody and knew it would be good for the children. But whenever she went out, Wes became sullen and moody. She’d spent hours reassuringhim that he and his sister came first. She planned out tactics to ease the boy comfortably into meeting her dates. And sometimes simply laid down the law and told him she wouldn’t tolerate any attitude. Nothing had worked very well; and it didn’t help that his hostility toward her most recent potential partner had turned out to be far more insightful than her own judgment. She resolved after that to listen to what her children had to say and watch how they reacted.
    She motioned him over. He joined them. “This is Mr. Boling.”
    “Hi, Wes.”
    “Hi.” They shook hands, Wes a bit shy, as always.
    Dance was about to add quickly that she knew Boling through work, to reassure Wes and defuse any potential awkwardness. But before she could say anything, Wes’s eyes flashed as he gazed at the computer screen. “Sweet. DQ! ”
    She regarded the splashy graphics of the DimensionQuest computer game homepage, which Boling had apparently extracted from Travis’s computer.
    “Are you guys playing?” The boy seemed astonished.
    “No, no. I just wanted to show your mother something. You know Morpegs, Wes?”
    “Like, definitely.”
    “Wes,” Dance murmured.
    “I mean, sure. She doesn’t like me to say ‘like.’ ”
    Smiling, Boling asked, “You play DQ ? I don’t know it so well.”
    “Naw, it’s kind of wizardy, you know. I’m more into Trinity. ”
    “Oh, man,” Boling said with some boyish, and genuine,reverence in his voice. “The graphics kick butt.” He turned to Dance and said, “It’s S-F.”
    But that wasn’t much of an explanation. “What?”
    “Mom, science fiction.”
    “Sci-fi.”
    “No, no, you can’t say that. It’s S-F.” Eyes rolling broadly ceilingward.
    “I stand corrected.”
    Wes’s face scrunched up. “But with Trinity, you definitely need two gig of RAM and at least two on your video card. Otherwise it’s, like . . .” He winced. “Otherwise it’s so slow. I mean, you’ve got your beams ready to shoot . . . and the screen hangs. It’s the worst.”
    “RAM on the desktop I hacked together at work?” Boling asked coyly.
    “Three?” Wes asked.
    “Five. And four on the video card.”
    Wes mimicked a brief faint. “ Nooooo! That is sooo sweet. How much storage?”
    “Two T.”
    “No way! Two tera bytes?”
    Dance laughed, feeling huge relief that there wasn’t any tension between them. But she said, “Wes, I’ve never seen you play Trinity. We don’t have it loaded on our computer here, do we?” She was very restrictive about what the children played on their computers and the websites they visited. But she couldn’t oversee them 100 percent of the time.
    “No, you don’t let me,” he said without any added meaning or resentment. “I play at Martine’s.”
    “With the twins?” Dance was shocked. The children of Martine Christensen and Steven Cahill were younger than Wes and Maggie.
    Wes laughed. “Mom!” Exasperated. “No, with Steve. He’s got all the patches and codes.”
    That made sense; Steve, who described himself as a green geek, ran the technical side of American Tunes.
    “Is it violent?” Dance asked Boling, not Wes.
    The professor and the boy shared a conspiratorial look.
    “Well?” she persisted.
    “Not really,” Wes said.
    “What does that mean exactly?” asked the law enforcement agent.
    “Okay, you can sort of blow up spaceships and planets,” Boling said.
    Wes added, “But not like violent-violent, you know.”
    “Right,” the professor assured her. “Nothing like Resident Evil or Manhunt. ”
    “Or Gears of War, ” Wes added. “I mean, there you can chainsaw people.”
    “What?” Dance was appalled. “Have you ever played