The boy’s skin is beautiful. She wants to touch his cheek, and at the same time she wants to ask him if his parents know where he is. Are they together? Divorced? Perversely, she wants to know if they cheat or have secrets. There’s a minute quake through her body caused by the desire to know and the desire to touch, and its epicenter resides somewhere below her stomach. The bartender is gliding past for a second time with a bottle in her hand. Karen should call Savannah. She wants to use her phone to put the boy in touch with his family. He reaches across the small table, lands his fingertips on her hand, and asks, “Do you read—for pleasure?”

Because her nose was turning red in the sun, Daniel Luckett bought her a hat with a long duck’s bill that honked when you squeezed it. When she lost this in the metallic chaos of Space Mountain, he bought her a hat with dog ears that flapped against her shoulders. She felt silly wearing it, but she couldn’t remember the last time a man had bought her something, so she wore it for a few rides, then purposefully forgot it in their scoop-shaped carriage at the Haunted Mansion. “You’re going to cost me a fortune in hats!” he said, smiling, steering them toward another shop. “Wait,” she said. “I just remembered, I have this.” She took a small bottle of sunblock from her purse and rubbed some onto her nose, then gave him a dollop. His fingers left smears of white over his brow and along his hairline. She laughed and told him he looked like a cupcake, then reached up and smoothed the lotion into his skin.

The day, parceled over different lands, subdivided into historical wormholes and fantastical digressions, seemed to last a thousand hours. She’d been to the park before, every couple of years while growing up, but she didn’t mention this, and whether or not he’d been there, too, didn’t matter; they continued to swap expressions of surprise and delight. Over burgers in a crowded eatery that was reminiscent of The Jetsons, he caught her studying his left hand. “Did I make a mess?” he asked, glancing at his fingers, though what she was looking for was the stripe of pale skin that might, on other days, have been buried beneath a wedding band. A few minutes later, dipping a french fry into a little paper bonnet of mustard, he said, “I wouldn’t be here with you today if I was married, you know.”

“Oh, I … wasn’t wondering about that.”

“Sure you were. And it’s okay. I know there are men who do that sort of thing, but I’m not one of them. I run a clean ship, Karen.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” she said.