His back was to the house and if somebody was calling his name he couldn’t really hear it over the racket of the motor, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder and he swung round, startled, to see Corey standing there in a mad explosion of sunlight and the car, the station wagon, idling in the drive behind him. He shut off the mower, and all the sounds of the day—his coworkers’ voices, birdsong, the drone of an airplane high overhead—came rushing back to him. “Dad,” Corey was saying, “Dad, we’re leaving now.”

He was looking into his son’s face but he couldn’t see anything there beyond the impact of the moment—was he frightened? Distraught? Upset over leaving his father, his friends, Nancy?

“Listen,” he said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his hands on the damp seat of his shorts, “you be good now, okay? And I know Jersey isn’t exactly Mexico, but it’s the beach, right, and at least you’ll be out of this heat—”

Corey didn’t seem to have anything to say to this, which was just talk, after all.

“And the summer’ll be over before you can blink twice, right?”

Corey’s voice was deep now, the adolescent croak all but gone, and lately, whenever he spoke, Fitz found himself momentarily baffled, as if some stranger had assumed his son’s shape and form. Corey said, “I just blinked twice. And look, here’s another one.”

He told himself it was all for the better—a little break, that was all—and there was no need to get emotional about it, but he was getting emotional, feeling all the air go out of him as if his lungs had suddenly deflated. Never once since his son came into the world had he been away from him for more than a day or two at a time, and this wasn’t just a day or two, it was a summer, or part of a summer, and even as the thought came to him he knew he wasn’t going to go to New Jersey to sit there sweltering in that cramped house while his father-in-law baited him and his mother-in-law presided over a sheaf of newspaper clippings about Tim and Millbrook and the evils of LSD.

“Okay,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “you take care now,” and he held out his hand and Corey took it and maybe he would have hugged him if he wasn’t so sweaty but then Corey dropped his hand and looked back to where the station wagon sat idling at the curb.

“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Mom?”