“And the prices? Coming back up?” Jim nudged one of the steaks with the end of his tongs.

Bobby shrugged. “Not much. You know, it’s still pretty rough. Not everywhere is like Manhattan. I mean, like, your house is worth, what, six times what you paid for it? Five times what you paid? That’s amazing. It’s not like that in Florida.”

“You could always move back, you know. You want to sell our house?” Jim laughed at the thought of it; he wasn’t serious. Who sold a limestone on the Upper West Side? Even if it was too big? Even if they got a divorce? Jim thought they would ride it all out, he was almost positive, and if they were going to ride it all out, they were going to do it in their house. Feet first, that’s what they liked to say. Every time they repainted a ceiling or fixed the crumbling 1895 wires in the basement—feet first, that was the only way they were leaving the house. Now Jim didn’t know. Franny had mentioned selling the house a dozen times, sometimes at full volume, and he had started to look at rentals in the neighborhood, but no, they wouldn’t sell the house, they couldn’t. It made Jim feel like his knees might buckle.

“Wow, I mean, that would be an incredible opportunity, Dad.” Bobby looked at him through the fallen curls on his forehead. Jim hated it when Bobby had long hair—it made him look too soft, too young, like a goddamn baby deer. Just like Franny when she was in her twenties, only without the spitfire spirit that had made him fall in love with her.

“Oh, I wasn’t . . . Moving back, yes. That would be lovely. I don’t think we’re quite ready to hand over the keys to the house, though, chum.” Jim hoped his voice sounded light.

“Right, no, of course.” Bobby pushed his hair out of his eyes and reached for the tongs. “Mind if I flip?”

“Of course,” Jim said, taking a step back, and then another, until he felt something prickly on his neck. He turned around and was surprised to find that he’d made it all the way to the trees at the edge of the manicured section of the yard, before the land dropped down steeply and led, eventually, to an ancient-looking town, where Spanish fathers and sons had tended olive trees and raised sheep together for centuries, working in tandem, like two parts of the same organism.

Bobby had retired quickly after dinner, claiming a headache, and Jim, Sylvia, and Charles had settled into the living room sofa for their umpteenth viewing of Charade, which Gemma happened to have on DVD. It was one of Sylvia’s favorites. Cary Grant was sort of like her dad, plus or minus the chin cleft—high-waisted pants and a way of talking that was both flirtatious and belittling at the same time. It was what stupid girls in her grade liked to classify as “like, sexist,” and she would have argued with them, but now she wasn’t sure, maybe they were right. Sylvia sat in the middle, with her head on Charles’s lap and her feet tucked up into her chest so that they didn’t quite hit her father’s thighs. It was a rare moment when Sylvia  thought she might miss living at home, but they did exist, even when she was already so many thousands of miles away. Walter Matthau was chasing Audrey Hepburn, his droopy dog face the saddest thing for miles. Sylvia closed her eyes and listened to the rest of the movie, kept awake by the chuckles and exclamations of her two companions.

Part of the fun of going on vacation with so many people was supposed to be that you didn’t all have to be together all the time—that was what Franny had imagined. She was clearing up the kitchen and the pool area—Carmen seemed to have been raised by actual humans, and put things away and helped wash dishes, but Franny couldn’t say the same for her children. The pool was a mess—discarded plates with nubs of fatty steak left behind, all the better to coerce coyotes or dingoes or whatever the local wild dogs were out of their hiding places.

“Let me help,” Lawrence said, pulling the door to the kitchen closed behind him. They were in sweaters now. In New York, they would still be shvitzing, the concrete of the sidewalk and the buildings acting as heat conductors, keeping everyone glistening from June through September. It was a lovely night in Pigpen, clear and dark. Once the sun went down, the only lights were the ones in the house across the way and down the mountain’s slopes. It reminded Lawrence of Los Angeles, only with a quarter as many houses and actual oxygen.

“Oh, thanks,” Franny said. “My children are animals.”

“Mine, too,” Lawrence said, projecting into the future, his arms already wrapped around a small body swaddled in cotton. A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “I mean, you should see Charles’s studio.”

“Oh, I know,” Franny said. “All ancient pad thai affixed to paper plates. It’s his response to post-1980s expressionism excess, I think.”

Franny sat down on one of the lounge chairs and picked up a pile of napkins and magazines and orange peels, Sylvia’s detritus. “She’s going to college. Ivy League. You’d think that she could throw something away.”

Lawrence reached out for the garbage, and then held it against his chest. He stood between Franny and the house. If Sylvia and the boys were to get up, in search of more to eat, they would see only his silhouette against the rest of the dark.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry about earlier. About saying something about the magazine, to Jim. I honestly don’t know what happened, but I do know that I put my foot in my mouth.”

Franny leaned back, drawing her legs up beneath her. She stretched her arms over her head, and then lowered them until they were blocking her eyes. She groaned. Franny had never felt older than she had in the last six months. It was true, of course, that was always true, that you’d never been older than you were at precisely this moment, but Franny had gone from feeling youngish to wizened and crumpled in record time. She could feel the knots in her back tighten, and her sciatic nerve begin to send out little waves of distress to the sides of her hips.

“I’m sorry,” Lawrence said, not sure if he was apologizing for worsening Franny’s mood or for whatever had happened with Jim at the magazine, or both.

“It’s okay,” Franny said, her eyes still hidden behind her arms. “I’m surprised Charles didn’t tell you.”

Lawrence sat down on the lounge chair next to Franny’s and waited.

“He fucked an intern.” She moved her hands and waved them around, as if to say “Abracadabra!” “I know, that’s it. Jim fucked an intern. A girl at the magazine, barely older than Sylvia. Twenty-three years old. Her father is on the board, and I guess she told him, and so here we are.”

“Oh, Franny,” Lawrence said, but she was already sitting up and shaking her head. He had imagined many scenarios for Jim’s sudden leave from Gallant, and for the tension in the Post family—prostate cancer, early-onset dementia, an ill-timed conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses—but not this one. Jim and Franny had always seemed happily solid, still capable of goosing each other in the kitchen, as off-putting as it sometimes was.

“No, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not fine, we’ve been married for thirty-five years, it is not fine for him to have sex with a twenty-year-old. A twenty-three-year-old. As if there’s a difference. I don’t know. Thank you. Sylvia knows some, but Bobby doesn’t know anything about it, I’m pretty sure, and I’m trying to keep it that way for as long as possible. Maybe forever.”

It was strange that Charles hadn’t told him. Lawrence felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment, his own, not on Franny’s behalf. How could Charles not have told him? Lawrence quickly imagined all the ways he could have mortified Jim and Franny over the next two weeks, without ever knowing what he was doing, all the ways he could have said the wrong thing.