When she opens the bottle of Dr Pepper, she holds it in her swollen hand, but screws the cap off with her other hand. Then she pours it into the ice-filled glass, until it almost bubbles over. “There we go.”

Mom comes in, and Granma says to me, “Do you want a scoop of ice cream on that?”

I look at my mother. “Knock yourself out,” she says. “Granma’s house, Granma’s rules.”

And that’s what it’s like for the rest of the day. It’s like a holiday, and it doesn’t matter what I do, so I watch a lot of TV. Mom is busy unpacking and I hear her talking to Granma, who is busy cooking and talking back. I think I fall asleep late in the afternoon, because it’s so hot—that’s one of the things they argue about, when to turn the air-conditioning on. Granma says you just get used to it, and anyway, she just has these little AC units in the window, which drip and smell funny and don’t really do anything anyway. And Mom says, “Well, that’s one thing we can take care of while I’m here. We can put in some real air-conditioning.” So they argue about that, too, and when I wake up again, the TV is still on. I’m lying on a weird, not-very-comfortable couch—it’s got wooden legs, and velvet cushions that are kind of worn through, and a sort of scratchy woolen blanket on top of it, which someone must have put over me. The sun is going down, and the air is yellow, like eggs are yellow, sort of oozy, and Mom is crying in the kitchen. Granma sees me—she sees that I’ve woken up, the kitchen and the living room just have an arch between them—and she makes a face at me, like, Don’t worry. I got this covered.

At supper, Granma opens a bottle of wine. We eat in the kitchen. Granma made chicken casserole, and I get another glass of Dr Pepper (even though I don’t really like it; it’s too sweet) and another scoop of ice cream afterward—for dessert, a big bowl of Blue Bell’s cookies and cream. “What do you want to do tomorrow?” Granma asks me.

I eat another spoonful of ice cream. There’s nothing I really want to do. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s like—I don’t know anybody anyway. “I’m fine. I mean, whatever.”

“Do you want to go swimming?”

“That sounds nice.”

“We could play mini-golf.”

“That sounds great, too,” I say.

“There’s a Peter Pan mini-golf course on the way to Barton Springs. We could do both.”

“Okay, sure, Granma. I mean, thank you.”

Mom says, “Stop sounding so darned polite, Ben, and say what you actually think.”

“I’m saying what I think,” I tell her. “We could do all those things. They sound cool.”

Apparently Barton Springs is this big rocky pool that’s sort of carved out of part of a river. I’ve heard about it but never been there. There’s also a secondhand book store called Half Price Books and a famous record shop called Waterloo Records and an ice cream place that we can walk to called Amy’s Ice Creams, where you can ask them to “crush in” anything you like, like Oreo cookies or pecans or Butterfinger candy bars or whatever, into whatever flavor you ask for. This is Mom’s idea—she took me once before, over Christmas a few years ago. I say “sure” and she sort of rolls her eyes at me, and Granma says, “Give him a break.”