“He keeps playing the same song over and over and he won’t let me talk or anything when it’s on,” she said.

“What song?” I said.

“‘Everybody Wants to Be a Cat.’”

“At least it’s a good one,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“You guys coming?” I called back into the house. Patrick and Mike shuffled slowly around the corner like they were expecting a Minotaur. Mike had put on a neon-orange polo shirt with a dark stain on the belly. He had a can of beer in his hand and another bulging from the pocket of his khaki shorts. Patrick’s sneakers were untied and he was wearing a Spider-Man bathing suit and no shirt. They stared at me with the same half-lidded eyes, awaiting instruction.

“You really don’t have to come,” I said.

“Whaddya think, bud?” Mike said. “Watch the end of Devil’s Advocate with Daddo? Blurred-out boobies?”

“Arcaaaaade,” Patrick said, jogging in place.

“Right you are!” Mike said. “Onward, Christian monsters!”

I would have insisted we walk, since it was only ten blocks away, but since it was raining—always—we piled into the Outback. Mike fell into the passenger seat and put on the pink sunglasses he found in the cup holder.

“Seat belts!” he hollered, facing forward.

“Patrick needs a shirt,” Amanda said.

“It’s not the fucking yacht club,” Mike said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Gosh, I’m sorry, honey.” He twisted around in his seat. “Uncle Mike didn’t mean that. It’s not the stinkin’ yacht club, right? We don’t need no stinkin’ yacht club, right? No?”

“You need to pull it together,” I said quietly when he’d turned back around.

He cracked open a beer.

“EVER-BODY! EVER-BODY!” screamed Patrick. “EVER-BODY WANTS TO BE A CAT!”

Mike turned up the volume on the radio until “Umbrella” blasted from the speakers for the thousandth time that summer. In the rearview mirror I saw Amanda with her face pressed against the window.

We pulled into the parking lot and ran through the rain and up the steps of the small boardwalk to the arcade. It was a buzzing, clanging place, with prize shelves piled with boxed blenders and stuffed animals. I’d loved arcades and all manner of deafening silliness when I was a kid, but now it gave me an instant headache. I fed a five-dollar bill into a change machine—the saddest action of fatherhood?—and the quarters crashed into the metal dispenser. I scooped them up and dropped them into Amanda’s clear-plastic ticket bucket.

“Don’t use these up too fast,” I said.

“I just want tickets,” Amanda said. She hadn’t cashed in the ones she’d earned on Monday, and she still had reams left over from last summer as well. She wouldn’t tell me what she was saving them for. It wasn’t clear that she knew.