He stops singing. “You’ll have to ask her that,” he says. There’s some mustard on my face, and he wipes it off with his napkin.

“Dad,” I say. “I’m twelve years old.”

“Well, put the food in your mouth then. It’s that hole in your face.”

He’s not angry or anything. This is just how he talks. I think it makes him happy to talk like this to me, like I’m still his little kid. My hot dog box is lying on the bench, and it’s sticky with ketchup—he picks that up with the napkin and carries it to the trash can.

“What’s going to happen to . . .” I start to say, when he comes back.

“What?” He looks at me. “What’s going to happen to what?”

But I don’t answer, and eventually he says, “Nothing’s going to happen, Ben. Right now, nothing’s going to change. It’ll just be like normal, except instead of living here and traveling all the time, I’m going to live there. But I’ll come back as often as I can.”

“Is that what Mom wants?”

“I don’t know what your mother wants.” He does this thing with his fingers, where he rubs them against his thumbs, like, to see if his hands are greasy. “To be fair, I don’t think any of this is what she wants,” he says. “But you can help me work on her. You can help me talk to her. That’s your job. You can say you want to move to London, too.”

I think of Jake, and our apartment, and Central Park. “But I don’t really want to move to London,” I say. “I want you to stay here.”

“Is that what you want or is that what Mom told you to say?” he asks.

“She didn’t tell me to say anything.” But that’s not totally true, and maybe I sound like I’m lying, because he looks at me like he doesn’t believe me, or like he’s trying to figure something out.

“Sometimes I think you guys are happier without me,” he says.

“I’m not.” After a minute I say, “I don’t think Mom is either.”

“Well.” He stands up, and I can tell the conversation is over. “This isn’t for you to worry about, okay. This is something your mother and I need to work out for ourselves.”

We take a cab back to Manhattan. My dad needs to make some business phone calls and doesn’t want to go underground on the subway. I spend the whole time staring out the window. The highway goes alongside a river, and I can see the shore on the other side covered in trees. I don’t mind that he’s on the phone. We’re sort of talked out.

I’m still hungry when we get home and ask if I can have a snack. Mom isn’t there, but Maria, our cleaner, is cleaning the bathroom and comes out with a mop in her hand to say hello. Dad retreats into his bedroom to finish packing. I have to follow him and ask him again.