He rings the doorbell, kind of angrily. Jake’s mother answers it. She’s wearing a long dress and has on bright red lipstick, but her hair is a mess. She keeps brushing it back with her hand.

“I think Ben has something to tell you,” my dad says, in a different voice. I mean, he doesn’t sound angry anymore. At least not with her.

I like Mrs. Schultz. She always lets you have as much ketchup as you want when you eat tater tots at her house. And a second bowl of ice cream. She’s one of those moms who looks younger than the teachers, like she’s Jake’s big sister or something. I don’t want her to think I . . . I don’t want to disappoint her.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Schultz. I think I broke one of your mugs when Jake and I were playing basketball.”

“You think you broke it?” my dad says.

I look down and take a breath. “I broke it.”

“Oh.” But Mrs. Schultz only seems confused. “We have too many mugs anyway,” she says to my dad. To me she says, “Don’t worry about it, Ben. Really—it’s not a big deal. But thank you for your apology.”

She closes the door, and when we’re waiting for the elevator to take us back to our apartment, my dad asks me, “How do you play basketball in a kitchen?”

I think he’s trying to be nice. Maybe he feels bad about embarrassing me, I don’t know. We’re not really used to being alone together, and I have that feeling you get when you run into a teacher on your own for some reason in the school hallway, and they have to think of something to say to you, and you have to think of something to say to them.

“Jake’s dad put up a hoop on the back of the door. They don’t really care what we do in there. I mean, they just let us play.”

I’m still mad at him, but he just nods.

Our building is this old-fashioned building and even the elevator is, like, a hundred years old. Sometimes it takes forever to come—there are these lights over the doors on each floor, which show where it is, so basically you can watch it crawling along, and if it gets stuck somewhere, while people go in and out, you can watch that, too. I stand there looking up at these lights because I don’t want to look at my dad.

My dad says, “Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I got it wrong.”

I don’t say anything, and he goes on: “Because I’m not around very much, when I get home, if I feel like . . . there are things going on that really it’s my job to kind of deal with, as your father, and I have this very narrow window of time in which to deal with them, sometimes I . . .”

Then the elevator opens and we get in. It’s empty—I was hoping somebody might be in it, so we wouldn’t have to talk. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” he asks. “In my job, it happens all the time. Things go wrong that you don’t want anyone to know about. But there are people you can trust and people you can’t trust—that’s the basic dividing line. And, believe me, you want to be on the right side of that line.” He’s getting worked up again. “Ben, look at me,” he says suddenly. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”