Mostly happy, anyway. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep and felt fuzz-brained and mildly crabby. Mia didn’t want to get out of bed; nobody wants to get out of bed at four a.m., but especially not an eight-year-old. She’d pulled the sheets over her head, crying out as if in physical pain when he flipped on the lights. But after a few minutes of back rubs and soft words, he finally convinced her to get up and pee and change out of her jammies, and her voice soon brightened, asking about where they were going and what they were doing exactly.

She never got to ride in the front seat with her mother—one of Nora’s many rules Jack actively defied—and Mia delighted in climbing into the cab of the pickup and snapping her belt into place and pushing on the radio and opening and closing the glove compartment. He had made her an egg and cheese sandwich and wrapped it in a paper towel. She took little nibbles of it and clicked the flashlight on and off and talked in her chirpy voice as they drove.

Last night they had watched the meteor shower together. He’d made popcorn and they munched it while lying on a blanket on the driveway. The light show had been beyond anything seen on the Fourth of July. Flaring streaks and booming flashes that never seemed to pause.

This early morning, the meteors continued to flash with a strobe-like intensity, and Jack’s eyes jogged between the road and the sky. “There’s one!” he said, and “Hey, there’s another one!” They reminded him of snowflakes fleeing across a window at night.

“That one was a pretty one,” Mia said.

“Pop quiz: What are the meteors made of?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Try to. We talked about it last night?”

“I can’t remember, though. That was too long ago.”

“Pieces of rock. Space debris.”

“What’s debris?”

“Like the leftovers from the comet.”

“I remember the comet. We had a picnic party then.”

“Right.”

“That was when you and Mommy weren’t arguing all the time.”

“I—yes—we don’t argue all the time . . . but anyway, as the comet travels through space, it leaves behind a mess. So the debris is the mess, the junk, the dandruff, the litter. After you eat a bowl of Cheerios or a bag of Doritos, I have to clean up the debris you leave on the table.”

“Mom says I’m not supposed to eat Doritos. She says they taste like cancer.”

“Then I guess cancer tastes good.”

“What?” she said.

“Never mind.”

“But.” She tapped at the window with her fingernail. “Why do the meteors blink on and off?”

“They’re burning up in the atmosphere. Pop quiz: What’s the atmosphere?”

“I know this one,” she said, clapping her hands as if to conjure this answer, “but I don’t know this one.”