They were sitting in a deserted diner in Boston at half past one on Labor Day afternoon, she, Fitz and Corey, staring down at plates of the lunch special (macaroni and cheese with a boiled pink hot dog and pale green pickle triangulating the plate) while a fan on the counter shifted the air and set it right back in place again. She was sweating, her blouse stuck to her skin and the hair at the nape of her neck as wet as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. They’d spent the morning tramping up and down stairs, going from one place to another, depressed, angry, willing at this point to take anything so long as it had four walls and a roof, but either no one answered the bell or some exhausted-looking middle-aged drone pulled open the door, croaked “Already taken,” and slammed it shut again. Just now, just before they’d given up and slouched in for lunch—an iced tea, she was dying for an iced tea—they’d gone back to the apartment with the mouse turds, only to find that it too had been taken by somebody whose level of desperation must have been positively Dostoevskian, and now they were here, in the deserted diner, hating themselves and each other too.

“I want to go back,” Corey said, pinching his voice in a whine of irritation. She could see he had no intention of eating the macaroni, which he’d separated into five ragged lumps surrounding the hot dog, from which he’d cut a single slice after lathering it with mustard, ketchup and piccalilli relish. He was slumped against the cracked leatherette of the booth, a comic book in one hand, a cherry Coke in the other. His mood, ever since they’d been deported from Mexico and stretching through all of July and August at her parents’, had been poisonous. He barely spoke anymore. And where he’d once reveled in the shore, in fishing, crabbing, boating, he’d spent most of the summer sulking in his room. She’d begun to worry about him and so had Fitz. But Fitz was so depressed himself he couldn’t seem to lift himself off the lawn chair in her parents’ backyard.

“Go back where?” Fitz asked.

“The motel.”

“You know we can’t do that,” she said, her tone flat and instructive. “If you want, we can drop you at the park and your father and I’ll go on looking. You don’t have to come. Not unless you want some say in what your room’s going to look like, that is.”

“I don’t care,” he said.

And then Fitz started in. “I told you we shouldn’t have spent so long in New Jersey.”

“It was cheap,” she said. “How was I to know everything’d be taken already? Last year—”