The tube slide coughs out Junior. Getting to his feet, he winds his shoulders a few times before locking them into the posture he’s been taught. His belt cinches the waistband over itself, making ugly denim wads around his hips. His clothes, even from here, are visibly filthy. He flashes a sweaty, hold-my-beer grin at Henry, and marches toward the ball pit, the girls. A sense of purpose drives his twiggy-limb strut as he ascends the steps to the ball pit, one by one.

And then, just as Junior crouches to dive in, the pretty mother calls the girls. It’s time to go home.

$77.41

A child should never stop smiling on his birthday, and so it’s up to Henry to overturn Junior’s grimace. Rivulets of ice cream streak off the cone and over the top of the boy’s hand, a milky tree branching down his wrist. More of Henry’s latest attempt to do his duty seems to coat the boy’s arm than his tongue.

In the McDonald’s parking lot sits their home for the last six months: Henry’s trusty F-250. The truck’s bed is lumpy with thirty-gallon Hefty bags full of clothes. Bolted flush under the rear window is a lockable, diamond-plated utility case holding the few valuables that hadn’t been set outside in the frost during a last-minute, mid-December yard sale. A few power tools and a plain white urn pin down a plastic folder with their birth certificates and old photographs.

Henry opens both the driver’s-side and suicide doors. A narrow bench seat is littered with Junior’s bedding, toys, school books, a plastic gallon jug for water, and Mom’s bese saka–printed shawl. Lying tipped on its side is the heating crown, a metal, nest-shaped contraption Henry made by crimping and molding a wire clothes hanger to support the dashboard cigarette burner under a can of food. As of last night, their dinner stash is gone. All the tins scraped clean and fed into a machine for nickels to save up for tonight’s surprise.

Before settling behind the steering wheel, Henry empties his pockets into the door’s side compartment. On top of a prepay flip phone, its minutes long spent and battery dead for a week, he unloads all the ketchup packets. Duct-taped in the frame of the passenger’s-side window is a layering of cling wrap as dense as a basement cobweb. When Junior closes his eyes, tilting his face to absorb the sunlight caught in the cling wrap, it reminds Henry of his own mother. Sad to think neither the boy nor his grandma would ever get to see just how similar they are to each other.

“Eat up,” he tells Junior. “You’re making a mess.”

The boy scowls at the ice cream cone as if it’s just asked a steep favor. To it he says, “My stomach hurts.”