We’d been at my mother’s beach house on the Jersey shore for three days, with four still to go. My wife Lisa and I were there with Amanda, plus our friend Mike and his wife Victoria and their son Patrick. (My mother was on a bus tour of the West with her no-longer-new husband.) Lisa and I had recently reunited after a six-month separation, and hosting our old friends was serving as a kind of official acknowledgment that we were recommitted to this thing. For a variety of reasons, that was only going medium-well.

Lisa was in Atlantic City with Victoria for the day. They had been very clear that Mike and I were to interrupt only in the case of life-threatening emergency. The men and women had been trading day shifts with the kids because we all agreed that a rainy day with all six of us in that house would end in at least one fatality. Mike and I had spent our day off watching insignificant sporting events in the cavernous, gaudily renovated bar in the middle of town. I’d stopped drinking, out of necessity, after my third beer, but Mike made sure to keep putting down enough for both of us.

Now he was in the Florida room, shirtless, drinking vodka out of a tall glass. His curly blond hair had recently crept up to the top of his forehead, and his face was significantly wider and redder than it had been when we met as freshmen at Northwestern. He was still, as my mother would say, a nice-looking man, as long as you didn’t focus on his belly.

“Al Pacino is shit,” he said, jerking his drink toward the TV. “Godfather, Serpico, sure. After that? Garbage.”

“I’m going to take the kids to the arcade,” I said.

“Didn’t we take them yesterday?”

“Two days ago,” I said.

He sank deeper into the couch. “They should use their imaginations. Do a play for us or something.”

“I already told Amanda,” I said. “You can stay here.”

“Nope, nope.” He hoisted himself to his feet. “Gotta support the team.” He patted his pockets. “Wallet, phone. Good to go.”

He pitched forward and caught himself, then snuck a glance at me to see if I’d noticed.

“Why don’t you stay here?” I said.

“Gonna find that kid,” he muttered, and walked toward the kitchen.

Amanda was sitting by the front door putting on her shoes.

“Patrick is being weird,” she whispered.

“That’s not nice,” I said, though of course he was weird. Patrick was prone to alternating bouts of hyperactivity and glassy-eyed silence. He was a couple of years younger than Amanda, but they’d always gotten along all right before now. And—of course I couldn’t say this—who was she, given our kitchen debacle, to talk?