The walls on either side of the front window were lined with pictures from his father’s job. He worked with cameras at the Space Center, and after each big launch he was given photographs, framed in thin black metal, that hung like award certificates all over the living room: trios of smiling, orange-suited astronauts; the enormous building where they constructed the rockets; silver capsules drifting down over the ocean, beneath orange-and-white-striped parachutes. Above the television was a large picture of Neil Armstrong standing on the surface of the moon, saluting a stiff American flag. His father ate dinner most nights with his NASA badge still dangling from his shirt pocket. He liked reading the paper and working on the lawn, and his favorite television show was the news, which seemed, lately, to be on all the time and had turned into nothing but men sitting around in suits, talking to one another. Frankie couldn’t picture what kind of fun the two of them might have.

“So,” his father said, turning away from the window. “What do you want to do?”

They looked at each other. His father raised his eyebrows and held them that way for a moment. Then he let them drop and walked over to the television. Andy Griffith was over, and he turned the dial to the men in suits. Lowering himself into the armchair next to the couch, he said, “You let me know when you think of something.”

The next morning, Frankie begged his mother to take him to Mrs. Woodrow’s. She was standing in the kitchen, about to leave for work, and she looked toward Frankie’s father at the dining room table. His father turned his eyes down to the newspaper and lifted one hand with the fingers spread wide, which somehow conveyed that it was fine with him.

They played Mousetrap. They played Battleship and Don’t Break the Ice! They played Lava, a game Jennifer had invented, which involved stepping cautiously around her room with their arms raised while she determined which pieces of furniture and which squares of her checkered carpet would incinerate them. Mr. Woodrow came home in the middle of the day and ate lunch with them, his yellow realtor’s blazer hanging over the back of his chair, and when he was gone, Mrs. Woodrow set up her card table next to the television and worked on her decoupage. Jennifer and Frankie watched The Big Blue Marble and sang along with its spooky theme song. “That song says the planet’s turning slowly, but it’s really spinning at a million miles per hour,” Jennifer told Frankie. “If it stopped, we’d all fly off into space.”

“That’s not true,” Frankie said.

“It is true. Isn’t it true, Mom?”

Mrs. Woodrow was leaning over a plaque of wood, spreading shellac onto a picture of a pelican she’d cut from a magazine. “It’s true,” she confirmed.