The man lowered his eyes. With a firm hand, he gripped his son’s head, forcing the aim of the boy’s face away.

We walked on. Pru giggled as she buttoned up. The sound of her tinkling laugh sent me back to junior high, slumber parties, night whispers, the TV with the sound off, homemade cake.

“Got weekend custody,” Raymond said, introducing me to his old dog, Connie. The dog was a pencil-faced collie with a brushed coat of butterscotch and white. She stood balanced sideways on the rear seat of Raymond’s big convertible.

Downtown, he parked at a meter. This was a Saturday but he bought tomorrow’s paper for me from a girl in a cap.

I followed him into a lobby with marble floors, brass door fittings, live plants. The building had a postal drop where Raymond collected a week’s worth of his mail—bundles of mail, rolled and rubber-banded.

“Could try Galveston Beach,” he said, when we were back in the car. “Me and Raf used to go when it got too hot for him in Houston. And coeds still show up on weekends hoping to grab a last-minute tan.”

“Sounds like Raf’s song. But what would we say if we found him?” I asked.

“We won’t,” Raymond said.

He had his painter’s radio, a slim black plastic beatbox, positioned on the dash. At Galveston, the radio picked up a program of garage-band hate music, and the speakers sounded with brittle crunch and din. “I’m Lisa,” the d.j. said. “Bringing you ‘Hell Comes to Your House,’ like it or not.”

Raymond jerked the wide steering wheel with both fists, maneuvering among pedestrians and double-parked cars.

Beautiful teenagers idled everywhere. They perched on cars and on curbs, leaned, looking glazed, against storefronts or affectionately on one another.

We drove to a beach slum away from the main strip, where the day’s buttery light cast wet-looking reflections on rooftops and ramshackle housing.

Raymond squinted around as we drifted along a street called Valparaiso. He let the car skid onto a gravel berm before a three-story with mud-green siding.

He climbed easily from the car, breathed a great breath, lit a cigarette.

I noticed this and that—a boy writing on a rock; a souped-up race car aboard a trailer behind a convenience store; a woman pedestrian wearing only a bathrobe; the sound of a car with no muffler; kids rushing from house to house, ringing doorbells, hiding in shrubs.

Raymond walked Connie and fed her a bowl of dried dogfood. She clambered back into the convertible as he sauntered up to the door of the three-decker.