“I don’t know,” Teresa said, one of her hands resting on a bag of hamburger buns. “I know how you feel. I do. But it just seems like we don’t have any choice but to go along. They’ve done so much for us.”

“Oh, God.” Roy dipped his entire body. “This is my father, through and through. He loves to play this game. He feeds me this crap about how I have to be the man of the house, then he pulls some stunt so I have to cave in to him. It’s his specialty. You know that, right?”

“I don’t think it matters,” Teresa said, choosing her words carefully. “We should just … accept this. Things can’t always be exactly the way we want. We have to compromise.”

“It’s not a compromise to let them dump their problem in our laps.”

“Matt likes the dog.”

“I’m going to lose this, right?” Roy looked up at the ceiling. “I’m going to lose this. Pop’s going to win.”

With one hand Teresa untwisted the tie from a package of hot dog buns. “We should think about Matt.”

“Matt wants the dog because he knows I don’t, and because we didn’t give him a bicycle. A month from now that mutt’ll be shitting up and down the hallway and Matt won’t want anything to do with it.”

“It’s his birthday,” Teresa said. “The dog isn’t going to live long, anyway.” Roy’s posture, the tight knot of his arms around his middle, suddenly seemed like a bad omen. Dermot had stood that way when he was anxious. He had stood that way for hours at a time, and she’d been too young, too naïve, to realize that it was a sign of restlessness, unhappiness, that he must have been holding himself down because he so desperately wanted to be someplace else. She let go of the bread bag and all but thrust Frankie onto Roy, who had to uncross his arms to receive the child. Frankie registered the shift by reaching up and fastening a hand around a wing of Roy’s shirt collar. “It would be a nice thing,” she said. “We can adjust to it. And it would help us all stay … content.”

He smacked his lips once and looked down at the dark, curly hair that covered Frankie’s head.

She pulled apart the hot dog buns and set them on a plate, waiting for him to respond.

Finally, softly, he said, “I’m content with things the way they are now.”

“Me too.”

“If I go along with this, will it … buy me points?”

“We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about Matt and his birthday and your parents.”

“Yeah, but will it buy me points?” he asked. “Significant points?”