“We found a craphole, right? And we’d be head over heels if we could only get it back again. I mean, this is ridiculous.”

“Last year,” she went on, ignoring him, “we had our choice of places and the only reason we wound up where we did was because it was so close to Corey’s school, if you remember. So don’t blame me. I’m not the one who got us kicked out of Mexico—and my parents really went out of their way for us. Which was a blessing. And you know it.”

Save your money, her mother would say every time she and Fitz offered to pay for groceries, and her father had been more than generous, especially when the car died and he just outright gave them her mother’s station wagon. They had the beach, littleneck clams, sweet corn, their own room with a queen bed and a separate room for Corey. And all for free. It could have been fun, had been fun for all those years of the past, but it wasn’t Mexico. And the depressing thing—the truly depressing thing—was that Mexico was never going to happen again.

“I’m not saying that.” Fitz was bent over his plate, impaling the last few scraps of macaroni on the tines of his fork. “I’m just saying I wish we’d come back earlier. I wish we’d got our shit together instead of—”

“‘Shit together’? You sound like Charlie.”

“—instead of putting everything off and sitting there drinking gin and tonic like it was going out of style. And Charlie and Alice got a place, if you want to know. Two bedrooms, sixty a month.”

“Where?”

“Roxbury.”

“Roxbury? But that’s in the ghetto?”

“They don’t have to worry about school districts.”

They both looked to Corey then, who still hadn’t touched his food. He was staring fixedly at his comic book as if none of this concerned him.

“Hey, champ,” Fitz said, “—if you’re not going to eat that, do you mind?”

And Corey, without glancing up, just shoved the plate across to him.