The fact was Bruno was no better than anyone: he knew they’d gotten the best one. The best child, the most beautiful and distinct. The red hair out of nowhere, the ability to hail a waitress across a restaurant. The love of maps, and of birds, the obsession with Charlie Chaplin. The native slapstick. The way he liked to caress with his shoulders and the side of his head. His animal nature. Yes, he loved birds but he wanted to take them out of the sky, too. Sometimes Bruno worried that this was an inheritance from him, how they both wanted everything they loved twitching under the weight of one big paw.

A pair of double doors took them outside into the chill, where a heated pool spun steam from its surface, as though it were the source of Galveston’s fog, on one side a swim-up bar advertising Bud Light. A middle-aged woman sat on a half-sunk bar stool and tipped blue fluid into her mouth from a statuesque glass.

“A bar,” said Ernest, in a voice of wonder, he who had given up bars for parenthood. (Bruno had given them up longer ago, for other reasons.)

“Have a drink,” Bruno said.

“Really?”

“Why not? We’re on vacation.”

They stepped, the three of them, into the slapping heat of the pool. The bartender was a young man with dark skin and dreadlocks, perhaps hired to match the island theme. He was dry, the bar itself a dam that kept back the water. “Under eighteen’s got to be on the other side,” he said, in a Texan accent. He indicated a beaded rope stretched across the middle of the pool. “I’m sorry, y’all,” he said.

“Oh well,” said Ernest, turning around.

“Sit,” said Bruno. “Shall we find the river, Code? While Daddy rests and has a drink.”

“Yes,” said Cody seriously, as though he’d been arguing this for hours.

“No,” said Ernest.