Effie smiled at him. “I’m glad you feel that way.” She stopped to pick up a shell from the flat, wet sand at their feet and turned it over in her hand. “It just feels so sad here, Henry. Sad and—I don’t know.” She looked past him. “Dull, I guess.”

It stung, and he opened his mouth to speak, but she kept on, oblivious: “Aunt Lizzie’s dead and gone. None of my old friends are here. Uncle George … Did you know he wanted to charge us for the cottage, and Mama had to talk him out of it? She had to remind him we were still technically his family. She was so embarrassed.” Henry didn’t see what that had to do with anything, but he said nothing. “I don’t know what I was thinking. That boy at the diner was right: we should have gone to Florida.”

“Eff,” he said, collecting himself, “we can’t go home early.”

“Oh, Henry…”

“No, listen,” he said, but he wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say. How humiliating it would be. How everyone would detect failure, even if it wasn’t really there: they would think it and it would burrow in and eventually become true. “Think of your mama,” he said. “My mama. What are they going to say?”

It seemed to have an effect on her. She nodded, and tossed the shell away. They continued walking, and Henry thought he had won the point, although what good was it if she was just going to be sad and bored the rest of the time? But after a few minutes she said, “I don’t care what people say, Henry. I just want to go home.”