“Okay,” he says slowly. “If that’s really what you want.”

“You can give it to her,” I tell him. “You won it.” But he doesn’t say anything.

Afterward, we eat hot dogs with mustard and ketchup and sauerkraut by the beach, and drink soda and look at the water. You can see our shadows on the sand. Because the sun’s going down, my dad’s shadow makes him look even taller than he really is—we both look stretched out, like we’re kind of stretching into nothing. He tries to talk to me about London.

“There are people at my company,” he says, “whose job it is just to make sure that when somebody moves to a new office, everything is taken care of. That’s their job—to make sure that everything’s okay. And that goes for the whole family—the apartment, the school. Everything. There’s a whole school in London just for American kids.”

He shows me pictures on his phone. It has a basketball court and a swimming pool—it’s just like a normal school, except it’s in London. “It’ll be like you never left New York,” he says. “Except in London, we’ll probably live in a house. We’ll have a garden. You can walk out of your own front door.” He shows me pictures of the houses, too. They’re painted white and look like a wedding cake—the kind you see in movies. He scrolls to another picture.

“There’s a street by the school with white lines going across it. They call them zebra crossings, you know, like the stripes. It means the cars have to stop for you. This is the most famous zebra crossing in the world because the Beatles used to make their music at a studio on the same street, right by the school. One of their album covers shows them walking across it.” He flicks through to another photo; it’s the album cover with four guys on it. They’re all wearing different colored suits. For some reason a car is parked on the sidewalk. “People come from all over the world to take pictures of this zebra crossing,” my dad says.

“People are weird. Anyway, nobody listens to the Beatles anymore, Dad.”

“What? The Beatles wrote five of the greatest songs of all time. ‘Hey, Jude.’ ‘Dear Prudence.’ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ‘Let It Be—’”

“I haven’t heard of any of those songs,” I say.

“That’s because you’re young.”

“It’s because you won’t let me have a phone.”

“Talk to your mother—that’s her department. But you don’t need a phone to listen to music,” he says. And then he starts to sing, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play . . .” His whole face looks different when he sings, even his body looks different—he kind of stretches his neck and closes his eyes. He doesn’t look like my dad. It’s like the only way I know he’s my dad is that he’s trying to annoy me.

“Why doesn’t Mom want to go to London?” I ask him.