Leo sat at his desk and picked up a pencil. In the voice he used for lying, or when he cared too much about something, he said, “If we go, could we go to Legoland?”

“I thought that was in California.”

“Real Legoland,” Leo explained. “Danish Legoland. Denmark’s where Lego was invented.”

“You’re not too old for all that?”

The glasses magnified his incredulous look. He looked like a 1950s TV journalist who knew he was being lied to. “Mommy, you know I like Lego.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” Lego: its salient angles, its minute ambitions. On her own childhood trips, Joanna had been at the mercy of her father’s interests. He drove the car; he decided where to stop it. Not amusement parks, not tourist traps. Instead: war museums, broken-toothed cemeteries, the former houses of minor historic figures, with tables set for dinner—soup tureens and fluted spoons—and swords crossed over the fireplace. Joanna, aged nine, ten, forever, had wanted to go to Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland. To the Mystery Spot, where ball bearings rolled uphill. To Six Flags Over Anywhere. A sign for Legoland would have driven her mad with longing, would have made her whine, even though whining—her mother would point out—had never gotten her anywhere. Her father would have driven on to some lesser Civil War battlefield to inspect an obelisk.

Leo was a child of divorce, and all his own vacations were airplane volleys from Rhode Island to California and back. The two of them had never really traveled together.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll go to Legoland.”

She had already renewed their passports, bought the tickets, reserved a Volvo with a GPS. But you had to give a child the illusion of choice.