“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m still torn whether you’re a redneck or plain white trash.”

“Come here.”

And so he did.

When he slides his boot toe off the men’s room door, something jingles. A bright metallic note skitters across the floor tiles, comes to rest in the corner. A quarter. He squats to retrieve it, slips it into the front pocket of his jeans.

$89.59

The way Junior slouches by the soda fountain, jaw slack as his shoulders and awe stretching his eyes, he ought to be watching a rocket climb into the blue instead of this fast food menu. The park’s dose of June sun has left a flushed, feverish slick on the boy’s brow. When he finally notices Henry checking his forehead, the boy’s posture snaps from languid to infantry stiff. Out of respect or fear, Henry can’t tell. Can’t help but wonder if the boy is still scared of him. Either way, he’s proud of his son, but instead of saying so, he just squeezes the boy’s neck, each vertebra a prizefighter’s knuckle.

“Dad?”

“Pa.”

“Pa, did you know Happy Meals are on the Value Menu now? Three bucks.” Junior flashes that same frown of approval Henry himself often makes before saying, “Not bad.”

It is, though—bad. Bad that Junior’s already weighing dollars. Even worse is the oil slick of relief that runs over Henry as soon as that internal, automatic arithmetic crunches out a figure that’s a third of what he’s budgeted for this birthday treat.

“You order whatever you want.” He steers Junior by the shoulders, settling them in line.

The clerk grips the cash register like a politician at a podium. His resemblance to Junior doesn’t edge anywhere near uncanny, but close enough for concern. Similar almond tilt to their eyes, cheekbones lifted, craniums egg-shaped. Pigments hard to place but sure enough dark. What well-meaning white people like to call exotic.

Nothing exotic about the acne splattered over the clerk’s face, so rutted and saturated that the boils down his neck look like runoff from the mess on his cheeks. Nothing exotic about the assembly-line hustle hard at work behind a geometry of stainless-steel panels and slots, glowing a fuzzy amber under heat lamps. Even though they’ve traveled a gallon east to celebrate at this one, a nicer one set on the final rung of the city’s suburban orbit, the half-hidden machinery of these places never changes. Only the clientele, and with them the expectations.