“No,” Ann said. “Anthony is worried they’ll get stung by a jellyfish or cut their feet on the razor clams. He thinks Mayo is dirty.”

“Dirty? It’s the ocean. Why do they even bother to come here?”

“How about we go to the park across the street from the beach?”

The boys tied the laces on their perfectly white tennis shoes and followed Michael and Ann like ducklings to the playground. They played flag football and Frisbee with the boys and taught them how to improve their time in the forty-yard dash.

“Want to play horse?” Michael asked.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a basketball game.” He tousled Brooks’s hair. “Don’t you poor little rich kids know how to do anything?”

They played horse for hours.

The heat persisted. They went back to the playground the next day and the next. The boys’ awkwardness seemed to melt away. They started meeting other kids their age. Michael had Ann all to himself again.

ONE AFTERNOON THE BOYS were in a pickup game, darting around with the grace of ostriches. After an argument over a foul Brooks called, they started taking jabs at each other.

“Did I ever tell you my dad was a lightweight champ?” Michael said to Ann. They sat on the bench outside the court, watching.

“Just that he was a boxer.”

“He traveled a lot for matches. He’d come around every few months and take me to the gym, or to watch his friends fight—but I never saw him compete. He’d never let me watch him get hit.”

The wind blew off the water, filling the air with the pungent, salty smell of the bay. Seagulls came ashore and dipped down to pick up bits of fries and picnic food the tourists had left between the benches and the basketball court.

“I wanted to be just like my dad,” Michael said. “He was cool. Real cool. He wore snakeskin shoes and he had a big cross on his neck, and he had two gold teeth replacing the ones that got knocked out in a fight. One year he gave me a punching bag for Christmas. I couldn’t make it budge. I was like those boys, skinny and weak. My dad, he taught me how to land a right hook. It was like he was dancing and then pow! He’d hit the shit out of it. All I ever did was hit that thing. After he got hurt and my mom hooked up with Marcus, I got so good the sand came out of it. I hated that guy so much. I don’t know what I would have done to him if it weren’t for the bag.”

Ann’s sunglasses reflected the cloudless sky. “What was your mom like?”

As close as they were, Michael hadn’t said much about his mom to Ann. It was painful for him to talk about her.