Illustration by Tim Lahan

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Not sure about ‘qat.’ ”

Jeremy looked up from the board with shock. His father had never questioned any of his words before. The old man’s lead was usually so big that he let him put down anything he wanted—proper nouns, abbreviations, even the occasional swear word.

“It’s a type of plant,” Jeremy said. “I learned it on Words with Friends.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an app.”

“Hmm,” his father said. “Hmm.”

Jeremy folded his arms and smirked. “You’re welcome to challenge it.”

His father picked at a loose wooden button on his cardigan.

“That’s all right,” he said, flicking his wrist. “I’ll let you have it.”

Jeremy grinned. His dad had only five tiles left and they were obviously doozies. He couldn’t remember a game ever being this close. He’d come within ten points once, during college. But his father had just come out of thyroid surgery then and was woozy from a host of strong narcotics.

“Are we allowing foreign words?” his father asked.

Jeremy raised his eyebrows. Foreign words were never allowed. His dad was the one who’d taught him that rule.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Hmm,” his father said. “Then I guess . . . I’ll pass.”

They both glanced at the scoring pad. “Dad” was still ahead, 252–239. But “Jerm” was about to end the game.

“ ‘Ta,’ ” he said, proudly.

“What?”

“ ‘Ta,’ ” Jeremy said. “T-A. Like goodbye.”

He slid his final tile into place, a “T” before the “A” in “qat.” He’d set it up and things had played out perfectly.

“Challenge,” his father mumbled.

Jeremy laughed. “Seriously?”

“Challenge,” his father repeated, his voice gruff with frustration.

Jeremy shook his head in disbelief. They’d both been using “ta” for years.

“O.K., fine.”

He creaked opened the Scrabble dictionary and showed his father “ta.”

“Here’s ‘qat,’ too,” he said, flipping back a few pages.

His father scratched his scalp. He was still up eleven points, but they hadn’t yet accounted for his remaining letters.

“Come on,” Jeremy said. “Let me see ’em.”

His father reluctantly flicked over his rack. He had mostly vowels, predictably, three “A”s and an “E.” But one tile leaped out, like a clump of gold in gravel: a jagged, ten-point “Z.”

“Yes!” Jeremy shouted, banging his fist against the table. “Holy shit, I can’t believe it!”

He subtracted his dad’s tiles from his score, added the amount to his own, and scribbled down the final tally.

Dad: 238. Jerm: 255!

He tore off the sheet and pocketed it. He couldn’t wait to show it to his fiancée. She’d read his dad’s textbook in college and considered him a genius. Her mind was about to be blown. He was posting a picture of the board to Instagram, when he noticed that his father was undressing.

“Dad?” he said. “What are you doing?”

“I knew this day would come,” he said. He stripped off his shirt and knelt on the ground, his naked, flabby arms stretched out in supplication.

“Club me to death,” he begged. “And eat my body.”

“Dad . . .”

“Eat my weakened body,” his father said. “For I have become too old to live.”

“Dad, come on,” Jeremy said. “It’s just one game. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

But he knew there were no other alternatives. The Stromberg family had been practicing the rite for generations. He himself had witnessed his mother shove his grandmother onto an ice floe. They were on a ski trip in Vermont, and his grandmother had forgotten the name of the actor who played Frasier.

“It’s not a big deal,” his mother said through sobs. “Everybody forgets things sometimes.”

The old woman shook her head stoically.

“Bathe me in sacred oils,” she commanded. “And cast me out to burden you no more.”

They’d fed Aunt Susan to a horse in Central Park when she was only fifty. She’d promised to get her niece a summer internship at Bravo. But, when she called up the producer she used to date, he told her he was no longer with the network. Layoffs were looming and he’d taken a buyout. Susan was shocked. She’d had ins at NBC for as long as she could remember. She’d dated assistants in her twenties, editors in her thirties, and producers in her forties. Now she didn’t even know anyone who worked there.

“It’s O.K.!” her niece insisted, as little tears formed in her eyes. “I don’t even care about TV! I just wanted an excuse to live in New York this summer—”

“Feed me to beasts,” Susan interrupted. “For I have outlived my purpose.”

Grandma Edith had walked off a cliff on Thanksgiving, after accidentally calling her granddaughter’s black boyfriend Barack.

“It’s O.K.,” said the boyfriend, whose name was John. “I’m not offended.”

But it was too late. Edith had already put on her New Balances and headed for the rocks.

Uncle Mort had taken the rite just two weeks ago. He was making some coffee for his daughter when a fuzzy voice blared from his dusty Dell computer, “You’ve got mail!”

“Oh, my God,” his daughter said. “You still have an AOL account?”

Mort’s wrinkled face flushed with shame.

“You’ve got mail!” the voice repeated. “File’s done.”

Mort nodded once at his daughter and she knew without asking what he wanted her to do. She led him quietly out of his house and drove him through Boca, toward the ocean. He kissed her on the forehead and then marched into the surf, his chin held high, proud to be leaving the earth with dignity.

Jeremy didn’t think that his father, though, was anywhere near that stage. He wasn’t young, of course. But he was still pretty vibrant. Just last year, he’d published his ninth book. Sure, it wasn’t his most original work. (The Journal of Anthropology had called it a retread of “Tribes,” his one best-seller, now out of print.) Still, it was a real book, with footnotes and a cover and everything. So what if nobody wanted to buy it or read it?

“I know you’re upset,” Jeremy’s father said. “But you have no choice. The time has come for you to perform your sacred duty.”

He rooted around in the living-room closet. “Where is that thing?” he muttered, rifling through a stack of old squash rackets. “Ah.”

He handed his son an oblong slab of wood. The club had been in the Stromberg family for years. It was by far their most ancient possession, even older than the George Foreman Grill.

Jeremy held the club up to the light. The bulbous side was stained with horrible reddish streaks. He looked back at his father and saw that he was kneeling on the rug, his balding head bowed toward him.

“Congratulations on beating me in Scrabble.”

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said, his eyes already glossy. “I didn’t want to.”

“Yes, you did. It’s only human.”

Jeremy clenched his fists with anger.

“Why didn’t you use your ‘Z’ earlier? You did ‘aero’—that could have been ‘zero’!”

“What’s done is done.”

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy murmured. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Yes, you did.”

Jeremy let out a sob as he raised the club over his head. ♦