Jim didn’t know it was possible to see actual wavy lines of anger around someone’s head, like a cartoon come to life, but when he saw his wife pacing back and forth on the sand, there they were, clear as day. Charles and Lawrence were standing on her left, and Sylvia was still tucked under her umbrella on the right. Carmen had made her way out of the water, and stood awkwardly in the background, her wet hair clinging to her shoulders like a cape. When Franny saw Jim approaching, she huffed her way up the beach to meet him. She made it just past the edge of Sylvia’s towel, kicking a little sand onto her daughter by mistake.

“Do you know what your son did?” Franny was hysterical, her eyes wild and searching.

“I do now.” Jim was in no mood for this. What Bobby had done wasn’t his fault—it had nothing to do with Jim or his own poor choices.

“He had sex with another girl, practically in front of his sister. In a public place! Should I be happy that you at least had a hotel room?”

Sylvia peered out from under the umbrella, her pale eyes tracking her mother’s movements.

“Fran, let’s talk about this at home,” Jim said. He stretched out a hand toward her, but she slapped it away.

“At home? In New York? When the kids are gone and you are, too, and so who cares anyway, you mean? I think they all deserve to know. It was crazy to think that we could keep a secret like this.” She pretended to look worried. “Oh, no, are there reporters here? Is anyone here from The New York Times?” The other patrons of the beach were staring, and Franny waved. “I think that woman’s from the Post.”

“Mom, we don’t have to do this here, okay?” Sylvia’s voice was quiet. She rolled onto her hands and knees and then pushed herself up to stand. She looked so thin to Jim, so delicate, just the way she had as a baby. He hated what she would hear next, and the way she would turn toward him, wanting it so badly not to be true.

“Your father slept with an intern. Your brother slept with a stranger.” Franny stopped, calculating how cruel she should be. “I don’t know how this happened.”

“People sleep with interns all the time,” Bobby said. “And strangers! Especially strangers! What’s the big deal?”

“She was not an intern, she was an editorial assistant,” Jim said. Franny looked at him and bared her teeth.

“The big deal is that she’s barely older than Sylvia, which makes me ill. The big deal is that your father and I are married to each other. The big deal, my love, is that you don’t seem to understand why this is a big deal. That is the biggest deal of all. Because my husband may have disappointed me, but if I haven’t even taught you that much, then I have disappointed myself.” Franny spun around and began to cry at a very high pitch, the sound of an insistent smoke alarm. Charles hurried over and tucked her into his arms. Lawrence shook his head in sympathy.

“I think it’s time to head back to the house,” Lawrence said, quickly gathering as many things as he could carry. “You get the rest,” he said to Jim.

“Franny, come on,” Jim said. “You’re acting like a crazy person right now. Just relax.”

Charles spun Franny out of his arms like a dancer sending his partner twirling across a ballroom floor. He marched up to Jim, stopping when he was two feet away. Charles gritted his teeth.

“Don’t you tell her she needs to relax, after what you did,” Charles said.

“I think we all need to relax,” Jim said, softening the air with his hands. He looked around at his children, seeking their support. “Am I right?”

“You have always been such a motherfucker,” Charles said. He pulled back his right arm, strong from decades of hoisting canvases and gallons of paint, and let it fly, directly into Jim’s right eye socket. Jim stumbled backward, surprised, and clutched his face.

“Let’s go, Fran,” Charles said.

Franny was shaking as if she were the one who’d been hit. She gave Jim a pleading look and then let herself be scooped back under Charles’s arm. They started to walk to the car.

“Wait!” Sylvia said. “Don’t leave me here with them.” She wanted to say more to her father but couldn’t. There was no air inside her lungs. Sylvia pictured the couch in the dark—maybe he had been there after all, not last night, but the night before, and for who knows how long before that. Everything was worse than she thought. She tried to remember New York, and all the nights since her father had stopped working, all her mother’s dates with her awful book club. There were too many things to think about all at once, and Sylvia felt like she might throw up. She dug her feet into her shoes, which were half filled with sand, and clomped after Charles and her mother.

Lawrence drove, and Sylvia sat in the front seat, giving Charles and Franny the entire backseat in which to cuddle and moan. Sylvia had never heard her mother wail like this—Franny sounded like a circus animal being trained to jump through a fiery hoop. Sylvia tried to face forward and ignore whatever was happening behind her. Out the window, palm trees waved hello, gigantic pineapples wearing grass skirts. The morning was bright, and Sylvia cupped her hands around her eyes like a horse wearing blinders. Lawrence turned on the radio, and Elton John’s voice once again filled the car.

After a minute, Franny’s sniveling tapered off. “I love this song,” she said, and started to sing along. Lawrence and Charles joined in—“Bennie and the Jets” in a fractured, off-key three-part harmony. Franny tried to sing the highest but couldn’t, and so Lawrence launched into an impressive falsetto. Charles sang bass and played along on an invisible guitar. The song went on interminably, their voices getting louder and louder, until they were all screaming. After Elton, the DJ said something in German and then played some Led Zeppelin. Lawrence turned down the volume.

“You guys know that song is terrible, right?” Sylvia said, though she was very glad that her mother had stopped crying. She swiveled around in her seat and clutched the back of her headrest. “You okay, Mom?”

Franny reached up and squeezed Sylvia’s fingers. “I’m okay, honey. I’m just, I don’t know.” She turned to Charles. “I can’t believe you really hit him.”

“You would if you knew how long I’ve wanted to do that.” Charles looked at the back of his hand, already sporting a pale bruise.

“Yeah,” Sylvia said. “I kind of wanted to do it, too. Men are fucking dirtbags. No offense, guys.”

Charles and Lawrence shook their heads. “None taken,” said Charles.

“Are you getting a divorce?”

Franny had asked herself the same question hundreds of times—when Bobby was small and they couldn’t stop arguing, when he was eight or nine and they were deciding whether to stay together, when he came home and told her about Madison, and on all the days he said or did something that she thought was annoying, like fart in a small elevator. That was marriage.

“I don’t know, honey, we’re still sorting it all out. We both love you and your brother. It’s just a little messy at the moment.” Franny wiped at her cheeks. “I must look like a wreck.”

Sylvia laughed. “You should have seen yourself at the beach. It was like you turned into Godzilla. Momzilla. You were Momzilla. Momzilla and Gayzilla Strike Back.”

“I like that,” Franny said. She leaned back into Charles’s chest. “Find something else we can sing along to, Lawr.”

Lawrence hit the dial a few times, hurrying past anything recent or in a foreign language (ignoring the fact, of course, that English was a foreign language in Spain), and eventually came to Stevie Wonder. Franny began to belt out the words, and hummed along with the harmonica solo, and so without waiting for further approval, he turned the volume up and kept driving.