Somebody else’ll have to kill you. I don’t want to have to think about you anymore. I guess that’s it.”

My father brought the gun down to his side and stood looking at Woody. He did not back away, just stood, waiting for what I don’t know to happen. Woody stood a moment, then he cut his eyes at me uncomfortably. And I know that I looked down. That’s all I could do. Though I remember wondering if Woody’s heart was broken and what any of this meant to him. Not to me, or my mother, or my father. But to him, since he seemed to be the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon, the one who had done something he would someday wish he hadn’t and would have no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world.

Woody took a step back, looked at my father and at me again as if he intended to speak, then stepped aside and walked away toward the front of our house, where the wind chime made a noise in the new cold air.

My father looked at me, his big pistol in his hand. “Does this seem stupid to you?” he said. “All this? Yelling and threatening and going nuts? I wouldn’t blame you if it did. You shouldn’t even see this. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do now.”

“It’ll be all right,” I said. And I walked out to the road. Woody’s car started up behind the olive trees. I stood and watched it back out, its red taillights clouded by exhaust. I could see their two heads inside, with the headlights shining behind them. When they got into the road, Woody touched his brakes, and for a moment I could see that they were talking, their heads turned toward each other, nodding. Woody’s head and my mother’s. They sat that way for a few seconds, then drove slowly off. And I wondered what they had to say to each other, something important enough that they had to stop right at that moment and say it. Did she say, I love you? Did she say, This is not what I expected to happen? Did she say, This is what I’ve wanted all along? And did he say, I’m sorry for all this, or I’m glad, or None of this matters to me? These are not the kinds of things you can know if you were not there. And I was not there and did not want to be. It did not seem like I should be there. I heard the door slam when my father went inside, and I turned back from the road where I could still see their taillights disappearing, and went back into the house where I was to be alone with my father.

Things seldom end in one event. In the morning I went to school on the bus as usual, and my father drove in to the air base in his car. We had not said very much about all that had happened. Harsh words, in a sense, are all alike.