Jim weighed his options. He’d seen it done before, and it would make the burning sensation stop, but being peed on by your father would sting, too. He led Bobby, limping, off to one side of the beach.

“Just do it,” Bobby said. He turned his head, defeated. “Like this could get any worse.”

“Let’s go in the water,” Jim said, “out of the way. Just watch where you step.”

They walked on the dark, damp part of the sand until the very end of the beach, where they stood against the rocks. Bobby closed his eyes and winced in anticipation. Jim pulled down the waistband of his bathing suit and slid his penis out, aiming for Bobby’s leg. He had seen it done before, but never like this. He wanted to explain to Bobby that he was still his child, that even though Bobby had made mistakes, and he had made mistakes, there were years and years of love built up between them, that they could go without speaking for decades and Jim would still love him. Jim wanted to tell Bobby about how much shit he had cleaned off his bottom when he was a baby, about all the times that Bobby had shot golden arcs of urine directly into his face. This was purposeful, this was nothing! But it didn’t feel like nothing. Jim sighed, and a warm stream was released.

The piss worked like a charm. Bobby’s leg was still patterned with raised skin, but it didn’t actually feel like it was on fire anymore. He and his father rinsed the small puddle off the beach as well as they could, and then headed up the sand toward the bathrooms and the snack shop to clean up.

The bathrooms put New York City to shame—a slightly sandy floor, but otherwise sanitary and orderly, with extra rolls of toilet paper and paper towels on view, the kind of things that would have been bolted down if they were in Manhattan. Bobby soaked a few paper towels with soap and water and cleaned himself off. Jim stood back and watched after washing his own hands.

“What’s going on, Bobby?” Jim made eye contact with his son in the mirror, which Bobby quickly broke, angling his face back down toward his wounded calf.

“Nothing,” Bobby said. “I mean, you guys heard all of it. I wasn’t making enough money, so I got another job. It’s not that much debt. I’ll be fine. I was going to ask you guys to help me, but it’s fine, I can do it myself.”

“I meant with Carmen. What was Sylvia talking about in the car?”

Bobby let out an exasperated moan. He turned around and leaned against the lip of the sink. “God! It was nothing. Some girl at the club. It was nothing. I know that you and Mom have been together since you were younger than me, and you guys have a great marriage and all, but things are different now. I don’t know. Carmen is fine, she’s good, you know? She and I get along really well. But I don’t know, forever? Probably not. So why pretend? It’s not like she’s gonna know.”

Jim and Franny had agreed not to tell the children about Madison, about Madison’s upturned nose and her blond hair and the way she had wrecked Jim’s life. The way he had let her ruin his life. No, that still wasn’t it. Jim had been the agent of his own destruction. It was the way he had wrecked his life by choosing to have an affair with a woman so young. By choosing to have an affair at all. Affairs seemed so old-fashioned, like something his own father would have done, and no doubt did do, over and over again. They didn’t threaten the marriage, because the marriage was a scrim, a false curtain pulled tight over the turbulent inner lives of his parents. Jim had never wanted a marriage like that, and he didn’t have one. He and Franny had struggled and fought throughout, especially when Bobby was young. It was never a foregone conclusion that they would stay together—that was something from the stone ages, not the seventies. They’d seen free love (at least on television) and still chosen to get married. Their eyes were open. It was impossible to keep the information (the basics, only the basics) from Sylvia, because they were all under the same roof, but it had been easy to keep the truth from Bobby. It made it nicer to talk to him on the phone, now that Jim and Fran, separately or together, could pick up the telephone and travel back through time to a better marriage.

“Bobby, I cheated on your mother. It was a horrible thing to do, and I don’t want to sound cavalier about it. The only aspect of the entire situation that I know I did right, however, was to tell her the truth.” Parenting was a terrible curse—it was about subjugating your mistakes so well that your children didn’t know they existed, and therefore repeated them ad nauseam. Was it better to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn’t sure. Either way, he wished that Franny was standing next to him, in this beachside Mallorcan men’s room. She’d be furious at him all over again, but she would know what to say to their son.

“This is a joke, right?” Bobby looked confused, like he was vacillating between pride and disappointment. His face eventually settled into a half-smile, the look that Jim had most hoped he’d avoid.

“It’s nothing to be happy about, Bobby.” Jim flattened his own mouth into a thin, tight purse. He motioned toward the door.

“No, come on,” Bobby said. He slapped the remaining water off his leg and shook it out. “It’s just that I didn’t know that. About you. It’s kind of funny. I mean, you’re my dad.”

Jim looked at him quizzically. A Spaniard in a very small bathing suit walked into the bathroom and headed for the urinal in the corner.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Bobby said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Jim.

Franny ducked under Sylvia’s umbrella to apologize.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. Sylvia looked at her warily. Franny wasn’t much for apologies, and her daughter clearly suspected there was more coming. Franny shrugged her shoulders and relented. “What’s going on with your brother? Can you tell me?” Franny looked back at the water. Despite the presence of electric fish, Carmen was still swimming. She was going to go back to America weighing three pounds, all the exercise she was doing to avoid spending time with the family, and for the moment, Sylvia didn’t blame her.

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“Of course I do,” Franny said, but she wasn’t sure. The debt was enough, and the job at the gym. She didn’t want to feel like a snob; she was the daughter of a truck driver and a housewife—how could she be a snob? And yet she wanted more for him. She wanted him to want more for himself. She and Jim had had so many whispered conversations over Bobby’s crib when he was a baby, even before that, over her stretching belly when she was massively pregnant. They had planned his future—as a politician, a writer, a philosopher. A personal trainer with a sideline of whey had not been on the list.

“He cheated on Carmen. The other night. I saw him. It was gross.”

“What do you mean? Dancing with girls, like?”

“Mom.” Sylvia sat up, her spine uncurling. Slumped over, her baggy T-shirt hung to her knees, her bathing-suited body hidden well beneath it. “Please. I saw a lot more than that. Like, tongues. Eww, can we not talk about this? It was gross enough to watch it happen once. I’m not dying to relive the moment.” She squinted toward the sun. “I can feel the skin cancer beginning to form.”

“You actually saw him with another girl?” Franny’s breath shortened. There was that sickening satisfaction at hearing gossip for the first time, swiftly followed by the realization that she’d done everything wrong, everything important. She leaned to the left so that she was able to see where Jim and Bobby had gone. They weren’t at the far end of the beach anymore, and she couldn’t see them elsewhere on the sand. Maybe they’d heard Sylvia open her mouth and had run, knowing what was to follow.