“That’s so true,” Carmen said. She pulled her purse onto her lap and took out a large plastic bag full of makeup, all of it miniature, as if made for dolls. “Samples,” she said over her shoulder, by way of an explanation. “This way I can fit everything I need. Three ounces or less.” She unscrewed a cap the size of a baby’s thumbnail and squeezed out a drop of cream onto the pad of her index finger. Lawrence watched as she rubbed it vigorously onto her face and neck with one hand while driving with the other, and then tightened his seat belt. Other people’s families were as mysterious as an alien species, full of secret codes and shared histories. Lawrence watched Carmen repeat the process a few more times with different potions. The car rocked to the side as she took a turn too quickly, and Bobby yelped, not without a sense of humor.

“She’s a terrible driver,” he said, and then braced himself against Carmen’s retaliation.

Bobby’s sweetness didn’t matter, not really, not any more than Franny’s bossiness or Jim’s reserve, or Sylvia’s precociousness. The problem was that Charles had abandoned him before they’d even left the airport. How much could two weeks undo?

“I’m a bit tired,” Lawrence said. “I think I’ll just shut my eyes, if you two don’t mind.”

“Of course,” Bobby said. “Knock yourself out.”

Lawrence closed his eyes. He’d begun to sweat, and the car’s air-conditioning seemed inadequate to the task at hand. He wondered briefly if Bobby and Carmen would chat in the way that couples do, about nothing of importance, but they remained silent.

The grocery store in Palma was heavenly. Franny and Charles clutched each other at the head of every aisle. The packaging was sublime, even on canned sardines and tubes of tomato paste. Being in a foreign country made even the smallest differences seem like art. Charles had once painted Franny from a photo in a Tokyo supermarket, her wide face beatific. It was one of their very favorite things to do together.

“Look,” Charles said, holding up a package of flan pudding.

“Look,” Franny said, holding up a bag of jamón-flavored potato chips.

The ham aisle was magnificent: chopped ham, bacon, chorizo, mortadella, sobrassada, salami, ibérico, hot dogs, ham pizza, sausages, ham jerky. They filled a shopping cart with jars of peanut butter and jam and toilet paper and juice—zumo—and lettuce and oranges and manchego and loaves of sliced bread. “What time is it?” Charles asked, as they stood on line at the cashier. “It feels like three in the morning.”

“Poor little duck,” Franny said, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. When they’d met, both Franny and Charles had been young and beautiful-ish, with enough style to fudge the rest. Her waist had nipped in with a good strong belt, and his hairline was only just starting to announce itself. They could live to be a hundred years old, and that would still be how Franny saw him—like a shorter James Dean, with curious eyebrows and curvy lips, just as gorgeous as possible. It didn’t matter that Charles was now completely bald, with only a laurel of stubble clinging to his skull—to Franny, he would always be the one she loved the most, the most handsome boy she could never have, except in all the ways she did have him, forever.

“How’s it going? With Jim, I mean.”

“Oh, you know,” Franny started, but didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Bad. Bad, bad, bad. I can’t look at him without wanting to cut off his penis.”

“Sylvia seems like she’s taking it all well, though,” Charles said, nodding at the cashier. He spoke even less Spanish than Franny did, which wasn’t saying much.

“But you haven’t even seen her yet,” Franny said, confused.

“Facebook.”

“You’re on Facebook?”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Sí. And why aren’t you? Oh, lovey, you are really missing out. But yes, Sylvia and I do the Facebook chatting all the time. I think she probably does it at the dining room table, sitting right across from you.” He lowered his voice. “She tells me all her secrets.”

Franny let go of Charles’s shoulder and knocked her body against his, threatening a stack of chocolate bars behind him. “She does not,” Franny said, jealous of both the fact that Charles knew things about her daughter that she didn’t and that Sylvia had found a way to communicate with Charles that she didn’t even know existed. “Sylvia doesn’t have any secrets. That’s what’s so wonderful about her. She’s the first teenager on the planet to just be happy.”

“Of course she is,” Charles said. He bowed his head. So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut. “And that’s the good part, after all. No matter what happens with Jim, you’ll always have Syl and Bobby. Kids are forever, even if love isn’t, right?”

“I’ll love you forever,” Franny said, sliding her credit card out of her wallet. “Kids, too, I suppose.”

Bobby knocked on the front door, though the house was as much his as anyone else’s. When no one answered, he tried the knob and found that it was unlocked. He turned to Carmen and Lawrence behind him, who both nodded. He pushed open the door. “Hello?” The house was completely silent except for the sounds of the trees swishing in the breeze and the occasional car on the road. “Hello?” Bobby said again, taking a few tentative steps into the foyer.

There was a thump from upstairs, and then the creak of a door slowly opening. Sylvia appeared at the top of the stairs, on her hands and knees.

“I’m jet-lagged,” she said.

“Come and help us with our bags!” Bobby said, his voice booming.

“Yessir, I’ll get right on that,” Sylvia said, before turning around and crawling back into her bedroom. The door closed with a thunk.

Joan wanted to get a sense of where Sylvia stood, and came over brandishing a workbook like one she hadn’t seen since middle school, with pictures of cows and broomsticks and other objects to identify. How does Mariella tell her friend that she MIGHT come over for dinner? How would she say that she WILL come over for dinner? Sylvia dutifully filled out a few pages before Joan, reading over her shoulder, stopped her. He was sitting close enough that Sylvia could smell his cologne. When guys at her school wore cologne it was obviously disgusting, but Joan made it seem sophisticated, like a Mallorcan James Bond. Sylvia imagined Joan’s medicine cabinet, each shelf crowded with male grooming products. His hair alone no doubt required half a dozen potions to move the way it did. Sylvia breathed as shallowly as possible while Joan checked her work. He clicked his pen against the table, open, closed, open, closed.

“Sylvia,” he said, “your written Spanish is good.” Joan stretched her name out to four syllables, like it was made of honey. See-ill-vee-ah.

“It’s okay,” she said. She wanted him to say her name again.

Joan backed his chair a few inches farther away. “We should spend our time just talking, you know, conversational.” He was wearing a polo shirt with the buttons undone at his neck. Outside, someone laughed, and Sylvia turned to look behind her, out the dining room window. Bobby and his girlfriend were in the pool, and she was riding around on his shoulders in a one-team chicken fight. Carmen was old, over forty. Bobby was an entire decade older than Sylvia, so he already seemed ancient, and that Carmen was more than ten years older than him made her seem like she was trying to drink his blood. They’d met six or seven years ago at the gym where Carmen was a personal trainer. Bobby’d been working out there, and then he’d brought her home. Sylvia found the entire thing very tacky, about as tacky as she found Carmen herself, who wore eyeliner every day and the kind of sneakers that were supposed to make your butt better, even though she was a personal trainer and had a fine butt and should know better, anyway.