One morning, after Matt, Joe, and Katherine had cleared out of the house, he stood in the kitchen talking to Frankie’s mother, who was calling from work, and Frankie heard him say that he’d figured out the lawn problem, and that he and Frankie were going to get to work on it that day. “We just haven’t had enough rain, that’s all. If this were last summer, with all the rain we had, everything would be fine. But we’re going to take care of it—give it a little jump start. We’re working out a whole sprinkler system.” He paused, listening. He began tapping a finger against the kitchen counter. “Teresa, I go through that paper every day,” he said. “But the fact is, there’s nothing out there.… Yes, I do.… Yes, I have, but it’s not going to happen overnight. That’s a lot of people they let go, and there are only so many jobs in one county. I mean, I’m looking at a whole career change. Do you really want to get into this now? Here, talk to Frankie.” He waved Frankie over to the phone.

“Hi,” Frankie said into the receiver.

“Hi, honey,” his mother said. “Are you having fun?”

“I guess,” Frankie said.

“Can I talk to your father?”

Frankie held up the phone.

They drove to the hardware store and bought a sprinkler that sat on a spike and spit water and shook its head no continuously.

The sand turned to mud, dried out, and turned to mud again; but it didn’t go anywhere.

His father still made him sandwiches for lunch but stopped making them for himself, grazing instead on whatever snack foods he found in the cabinets. Some nights he didn’t eat dinner with the rest of the family, claiming he wasn’t hungry, and there were mornings when Frankie came out into the living room and found him asleep on the couch.

One evening, just after they’d finished a meal without him, Frankie’s mother was doing the dishes and his father walked into the kitchen and started eating a piece of baloney. A fight broke out. They yelled, and then whispered, and then yelled for a long time. Katherine and Matt closed themselves up in their bedrooms and turned on their record players, and Joe dropped down onto his bed to read a comic book, but Frankie stood and listened in the doorway of the room they shared. He heard his mother shouting about how embarrassed she was, how tired she was, how frightened, and his father shouting about which boat he was in, what didn’t fly with him, what was driving him up a tree. Frankie waited to hear the word sand, but he never did.