She let go of Frankie’s throat and wiped a drop of toothpaste from her arm onto his shirt. “The sand.”

“I don’t know anything!” Frankie said.

“Who cares about the sand?” Matt looked at himself in the mirror. He drew the hairbrush across each side of his head, reestablishing his part. “I’m just glad he’s not my real dad. No job. No friends. And he voted for Nixon.”

Frankie asked his father the next day if he could please go to Mrs. Woodrow’s house to play with Jennifer. His father looked irritated. “We’re a team. You’re not going to quit on me now, are you?” He got Frankie a can of Pix soda, handed him an entire bag of potato chips, and told him to sit on the front porch and keep an eye out for squad cars. Frankie sat in the middle of the porch and ate the potato chips while his father distributed the first two piles of sand across the lawn one shovelful at a time.

“So,” Frankie’s mother said when they were all at the table that night, her eyes tired-looking and her mouth bent into a smile. “I thought it might be nice if your father told us about what’s happening with the yard.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other.

“We’re replenishing the soil,” he said. He glanced around the table as if he was waiting for an argument, or a burst of laughter. “This island’s technically three feet below sea level. I don’t know if you knew that. There’s a lot of dampness in the ground, and then we get all that rain on top of it. Over time, the soil gets washed away and the roots get exposed, so the soil needs to be replenished. I’ve researched this.”

“Don’t the Petersons have the same soil we do?” Matt asked.

“Yes.”

“Their grass looks great. It’s like a golf course.”

“That’s because the Petersons have WonderLawn come out and hose their yard down with expensive chemicals. And their grass is St. Augustine. Ours is Bahia. It’s thinner.”

“And,” Frankie’s mother said, shrugging again, “how long will the sand be there?”

“Until it sinks into the ground. It’s for the soil. It’ll sink in on its own, and the grass will look a thousand times better.” He reached for a slice of bread. “Two weeks, tops.”