The mouth of the tube slide produces two girls who dash across the padded floors, scamper up the steps, and belly-flop into the ball pit with two plastic splashes. From above, in a sagging cage made of stitched cargo straps, Junior watches the girls giggling and swimming through the ball pit. At such a distance, it might be a trick of the eye, but the expression on the boy’s face is forlorn. Moldy with a despondent longing no eight-year-old should understand, let alone endure. If that wasn’t enough, his son now reaches through the straps of the cage, and this whole prisoner metaphor is pretty much too much for Henry to bear.

What else to look at but the pretty mother? This time he strives for subtlety, glancing from the corners of his eyes with his chin aimed out the window, ready to act as if he’s waving to someone pulling up in the parking lot, in case she catches him leering all over again. But studying her this time around, it’s like he’s scanning her for flaws. A sort of secret payback for everything he’d imagined she might have thought about him.

And so he decides she is wearing too much makeup—way too much for a Tuesday evening at McDonald’s. Yet another prom queen past her prime, scrambling after the shrapnel of her bombshell days. Maybe she paints herself up like that because she doesn’t see herself as beautiful as—he can’t help but admit—she really is. The sharp arcs of her features and the oaky polish of her skin suggest some sun-bleached Mediterranean village, not a franchise grease pit here in flyover country. She ought to be draped in white linen, not that waxy athleisure wear. Still, the elasticity of her outfit offers a lovesick-making display of her architecture, a form so deliberate in its bends and narrows, it’s as if Henry himself had sculpted his ideal woman into breathing. She’s got that spitfire air of a woman who isn’t scared to tell a man exactly how she wants to be kissed, how she expects to be loved.

He is positive he could do precisely as instructed.

It’s as if the crescendo of this imagined feast signals her. Those martini-olive irises, feline in their shading, now meet his. With the same shamelessness with which she’d taken him in his fantasy, her eyes now roll at him in reality, in this PlayPlace.

McChicken. Burger meat. Pig.