Then Ray raised the battered tabletop game, and Ethan started laughing.
Three months earlier, football had still been something ordinary in our house.
Sunday afternoons meant Chris yelling at the television, Ethan correcting him, and me pretending I didn’t care while complaining louder than both of them whenever I thought a referee had missed something.
“Mom,” Ethan once told me, laughing, “you don’t even know the rules.”
“I know cheating when I see it.”
Chris nearly choked on his chips.
Then Ethan’s cancer stopped responding to treatment.
One afternoon, his
