Ben shoots Mom a look. “I’m not kissing up. I really do like Steinbeck.”

“I know,” she says. “We can talk books later.”

“Great,” he says.

The conversation continues, and a few minutes later Ben finishes a bite of spaghetti and goes to say something but stops.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I was going to say how great the spaghetti is, but then I realized your dad would just think I was kissing up to him, too.”

“No, no, no. Feel free to compliment the spaghetti,” Dad says. “That’s totally different.”

“How is that different?” I ask.

“Because unlike the collected works of John Steinbeck, the epic greatness of my spaghetti sauce is indisputable. Go ahead, son, kiss away.”

“I want to make it when I go back home, so can you tell me what jar it comes in?”

My mother and I burst out laughing, and Dad’s eyes open wide in horror.

“A jar? You think I make spaghetti sauce out of a jar? I’ll have you know my mother was born in Italy. And not the one in Epcot. The real one.”

Dad loves giving people a hard time. He calls it “bustin’ their chops,” but I refuse to use that term because I’m not some high school boy in the 1980s. But the truth is, he loves it even more when someone is willing to bust his right back.

“I’m just kidding,” Ben says. “It’s delicious. Is it your mom’s recipe?”

“Actually, no,” Dad says, bursting with pride. “I invented it.”

“I think ‘developed’ would be a more appropriate usage,” the English teacher across the table from me says. “‘Invention’ usually implies some sort of groundbreaking shift or advancement.”

“Like I said,” Dad replies with his booming voice, “I ‘invented’ it.”

Mom and I laugh because we know that Dad has just begun. He could talk about his sauce for hours.

“I’ve spent years perfecting it. It is perfect, don’t you think, Ben?”

“‘Perfect’ is exactly the word I would use.”

“And I’ve never written the recipe down. I keep it all up here.” He taps his right temple. “I make it for my team the night before every big race.”

“Then let’s hope it pays off tomorrow.”

“It most definitely will.”

While the inspiration for the meal may have been good manners, the menu selection was all about carbo-loading. Tomorrow Ben and Dad are driving to Cocoa Beach for the Rocket Run, a 10K road race whose name was inspired by the nearby space center. They’ve trained together a couple times a week and have turned it into some sort of male bonding thing.

“The trick is that you have to make sure the sauce is not too heavy. My mom’s sauce is great, but if you ate it the night before a race, it would slow you down. This is light but still has enough kick to make it worthwhile.”

“Too bad it doesn’t come in a jar,” Ben says after another forkful. “I’m sure my team back home in Madison would love it.”

“I can teach you to make it,” Dad says out of the blue. “You’ve just got to promise not to tell anyone else. We’ll keep it between you and me.”

“I promise.”

Ben’s happy. Dad’s happy. I, however, am . . . not happy.

“Excuse me?” I say.

“What’s the matter?” asks my dad.

“When I asked you how to make it, you said that I couldn’t be trusted.”

“That’s because you’re terrible with secrets,” explains my father. “But I trust Ben.”

I know this started out as a joke, but there’s a part of me that is semi-offended here. I really did ask him to teach me, and he really did refuse.

“What makes you so sure you can trust him?”

Dad looks at me as if it should be obvious. “Well, I’ve already trusted him to take care of the thing that I love the most in the world. I think he can handle a spaghetti recipe.”

I’m glad that my dad loves me so much, but seriously. “I’m not just some thing you trusted him with. I’m your daughter.”

The three of them are quiet for a moment, and then I hear Ben trying to hold back a laugh. He fights it for as long as he can, but then it finally erupts.

“What’s so funny?” I ask him.

“I don’t think he was talking about you, Izzy.”

I look at their faces and can tell that he’s right.

“Then what was he talking about?”

“His surfboard. He trusted me with his surfboard.”

“Black Beauty is the thing you love most in the world?” I say, with all the outrage I can muster while laughing.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Dad says. “I thought you knew.”

Now Ben is really losing it, and I realize that I’ve never seen him laugh this hard. He’s like a kid having a good time, and it dawns on me that this is the thing he’s been missing. Maybe it’s even the thing he thought he’d never get again. His family is breaking apart, and there will never be any dinners like this where his mom and dad are sitting around the table telling jokes and giving him a hard time.

The rest of the meal is filled with funny stories and new insights. For example, I learn that in college he’s hoping to major in English—another swoon from my mother—and that he’s terrified of roller coasters—more chop busting from my father.

Originally I was thinking we might go out after dinner to catch a movie, but instead I suggest he get a taste of the übercompetitive cage match that is our family game night.

“The game is charades,” Dad says as we move to the living room. “Lucas-style charades.”

“What’s Lucas-style?” Ben asks me.

“Lucas-style is when your parents are both teachers and they like to take everything that’s fun and turn it into something that’s educational and maybe a little less fun. Like at my fifth-grade birthday party, where instead of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, we played Pin the Beard on the Civil War General.

“It was one of those big bushy beards,” Dad tries to explain to Ben. “But it just didn’t translate.”

“No, it didn’t,” I say.

“And how do you do Lucas-style charades?” Ben asks.

“The categories have more of an Advanced English and AP American History vibe,” I answer him. “Instead of TV shows and celebrities, we’ve got categories like Underappreciated Authors, Historic Battlefields, and my personal favorite, Politicians of the Nineteenth Century.”

“Those were good clues,” Dad says rehashing a sore spot from a past game. “I was pretending to ‘fill’ the cups and get ‘more’ of them. Fill . . . more. Millard Fillmore.”

“Those clues are only obvious to you,” I say.

“Well, today you don’t have to worry about my clues,” Dad says. “That’s because this is a battle of the sexes—Mom and you against Ben and me.”

And, then, as if gender supremacy wasn’t enough, he raises the stakes just a little bit more and says, “Winning team picks what flavor ice cream we get from the Islander.”

“You’re on!” I say, in a growl that would make a professional wrestler proud.

Ben lights up as we break up into teams, and I can tell he really needs some family time. When it’s time to play, I’m up first, and I pull “William Shakespeare” out of the hat.

“We got this,” I say to Mom as I get into position.

Dad hits the stopwatch and signals me to go.

I do the signs for “writer” and “second word” and start shaking side to side. Ben and Dad laugh hysterically, but I ignore them.

My mom starts shouting out answers. “Twist. Shimmy. Shake.”

I signal that she’s right with “shake” and move on to the next part of the word. I pretend to throw a spear, and it takes her a moment to figure it out, but then she gets it.

“Shake . . . spear. William Shakespeare!”

Dad hits the stopwatch and announces our time. “Twenty-three seconds.”

Mom and I high-five. We feel pretty confident, and I can already taste the mint chocolate chip ice cream I plan on selecting.

Ben’s up next and draws a name from the hat. Since I’m the timekeeper, he shows it to me, and I see that it’s “J. D. Salinger.”

“This round’s all ours,” I assure my mom. “No way they’ll beat twenty-three seconds.”