Tim lifted his cup and Charlie, Ken, Fanchon and Rick followed suit. “To Mexico!” he cried, and Fitz, riding a sudden swell of joy that sank the library, his cramped apartment and the psych building from sight as if the pellucid waves had already closed over them, raised his too.

He was a bit foggy the next morning—and he had a headache, the first tequila headache of his life, which, he noted dully, was a novelty in itself—but he woke to a vision of frothing surf, white beaches and a sun parked overhead. Joanie was already up—he could hear her in the kitchen, rattling the pot she soft-boiled her morning eggs in, then padding across the floor to slip into Corey’s room and whisper him awake. Some mornings, depending on her mood, she rattled out, “You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning!” as her waking anthem, but today she just whispered, as if to spare them all.

She’d been asleep by the time he got in, so he hadn’t had a chance to broach the subject of Mexico to her, though in the car on the way back from the bar they’d all retired to after Tim shut up his office, he’d begun to marshal his arguments. He hadn’t been in much of a condition to drive, but he drove anyway, talking aloud to himself the whole way home on the dark familiar streets, foreseeing and countering Joanie’s objections in the way Tim had countered his own. The fact was, it wasn’t going to cost anything, or hardly anything, and it would be good for them all, for Corey especially—he could see a new part of the world and maybe even pick up the language, which would be a real advantage in school. Weren’t they offering Spanish now? Wasn’t it taking over from French and German? Wasn’t it the language of the future?

She was reading the newspaper she’d propped up on the napkin holder and hovering over her eggs when he came into the room (runny eggs, with flecks of partially cooked albumen in a mucilaginous goop that very nearly made his stomach turn), but he managed to right himself, call out a soft “Good morning” and go to the stove for a cup of coffee. Her hair was damp still from the shower, her face smooth and pale without her makeup. It was a relaxed face, pretty, the most familiar face in the world to him, a face at the kitchen table at the very center of his life. To see her there like that, her ordinary self, struck him with a force that took him by surprise, and he felt a surge of sentimentality, of love, rush through him. Of course she’d want to go to Mexico—why wouldn’t she? She could see her mother anytime—and the smell of that place on the Jersey Shore, the mold, the damp, everything clammy even in August . . .