Bones looked up at me and asked, "Lump, what's wrong?" I guess I was staring at him for too long.

The pounding of the rain on the roof had reached an epic level, and I had to yell to be heard. "I don't know, Bones. Maybe it's not such a good idea . . ." I trailed off. "You know, with the cancer and all."

     I'm not sure he heard everything, but he knew what I was getting at. "No way, Lump! I lost! I'm going!"

The good thing about having a dad in the security business was the system in our garage that showed camera angles from almost every point on the property. I could watch Bones "live" across twelve monitors. There was a stopwatch app built into the system and I pulled it up. Of course we always timed our runs. The record was fifty-four seconds, owned by Bones.

Without hesitation, Bones yelled "Go!" and bolted out the garage door. He went around the front first. He was moving pretty slow because of the rain and headed toward the side yard, running around the fence that surrounded the pool.

By the time he was at the far end of the fence, he was nowhere near record pace. He started running down the back alongside the big hill, but then he slid in the mud and went rocketing straight down, out of sight. The hill behind our house dropped a hundred feet on a really steep slope so I panicked.

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