The next day, Rick powered the SUV up the drive after coaching the boys' first lacrosse practice—a hot mess of introductions and half-executed drills—with a pretty good idea what he was going to find inside.

"Dad!" Reid called from the backseat. "My seatbelt's jammed again."

Rick squinted down the block. Beginning five houses away, cars lined the curbs, ten or fifteen of them. Val must've told people to park and walk to keep up the ruse.

"Da-aaad!"

Anger flashed through Rick. He'd been ignoring a low-grade headache all day, then Reid had nailed him in the ear with a lacrosse ball during a water break. Why Reid—why any of them—had been throwing balls during water break was an open question.

"Your seatbelt isn't stuck," he said without looking back. "You just lean forward to release it, remember?"

Rick peered at the house, at the great room curtains alive with shadows. The Huangs would be here, of course—the husband never let them miss a party. The Kavanaughs had been mainstays lately, too. The Merritts, the Glassers' best friends, were fifty-fifty; they weren't big drinkers but might show out of loyalty. Rick and Val had batted around a tweaked invite list for a potential Tramp Bar launch party, some investor types and maybe Wallace Blakely from the bank, but tonight ought to be the usual suspects.

He glanced down the block again. The first car was a Lexus. Who do we know that drives a Lexus?

From the passenger seat, Wyatt said, "Leaning isn't gonna do it, Dad. He needs help."

Rick squeezed his eyes—pain sang in the ear that'd caught a ball—and twisted to look. Reid sat with a constipated expression, his door-side arm pinned across his chest, that hand's skin caught between the buckle and receiving tongue of the seatbelt.

"Bud, how..." Rick started, then trailed off.

Ava said, "I told him not to."

Rick patted her knee, then freed his youngest with gentle, practiced fingertips.

He left the mesh bag of lacrosse equipment in the way-back, not wanting to lug it through the party, knowing there was about a 70 percent chance he'd forget and the car would be all musty tomorrow.

The kids followed up the cobblestone path. As Rick approached the house, curtain silhouettes resolved to heads, torsos, and arms—some holding stemmed triangles. Had Val done mojitos?

God, he hoped.

He made a show of using his key in the lock.

"Surprise!"

Voices chorused into the formerly quiet street. Rick shuddered and flattening his hands to his sides like a spooked penguin. Val emerged from the mass of raised cups and easy grins. She carried—yes!—an iced drink garnished with mint.

"Happy forty-first," she said.

Rick dropped his keys on the mahogany bench and took the drink. "You didn't have to."

Her eyes flashed. "So?"

They kissed, drawing a round of wolf whistles.

The feel of his wife, together with the release of joining adult company—adults who didn't demand or spill or fight over nothing (usually)—was a salve for Rick's frazzled nerves. He took a long swig, savoring that sweet lime fizzing down his throat.

The kids slipped past to soda, chips, and other distractions. Rick scanned past the first layer of revelers and noticed an older man in wire-rimmed glasses and a tweed coat. He stood idly, unattached to any conversation circle.

Val regularly threw open their doors to retirees in the neighborhood, raving about their flower beds, hassling the kids into polite hellos.

But this was no neighbor.

"You invited Blakely?" Rick whispered. "This party might not show us in our best possible fiduciary light, you realize."

"I realize." Val wrapped both arms around his waist, her mouth at his ear. "If he sips the coffee and it's too hot? Burns his tongue? He's not the only loan officer in Franklin."

No, Rick thought, feeling hot himself, but he is the one who could neg us and put me into default with suppliers before I'm even off the ground.

Now the Glassers joined friends, fellow Riverdawgs parents, new business associates, and a stray uncle or two in revelry. Val introduced around a Hispanic man in his twenties who'd just started in the Franklin Federals' digital marketing group. Rick hadn't even managed a refill when the gravelly voice of Barnacle pulled him into the study.

"They ought to rename Hodgkiss 'Dandelion Way,' I swear," said the former industrial parts executive. "Why do we bother? Next time the wind kicks up, we'll have a yardful of 'em ourselves."

"Are they that bad?" asked Rick, who relied on a lawn service for their weed control.

"Awful," Barnacle said. "Seen that yellow house with the sycamore out front?" His gray mouth turned down at the corner.

"No. Fluffed out?"

Barnacle scoffed. "Disgraceful."

Rick didn't say what he thought—that dandelion fluff couldn't navigate around corners—nor did he mind the grumping. Barnacle hitching his thumbs into high-belted trousers and complaining was as much a part of Glasser parties as queso dip or kids knocking over the TV's slim tower speakers.

"Speaking of disgraceful home-owners on Hodgkiss," Rick said, "where are those Merritts? Did they come?"

Barnacle growled indeterminately. Val, breezing past with her new Feds' contact, Alejandro: "Hope told me they couldn't swing it. School night and all."

"School night?" Rick said. "But it's summer."

"I tried that very argument."

Barnacle, watching Val's departing hips a bit too long, said he saw those Merritt kids running around their backyard all day long. "Aren't they, what do they call it, home-stay kids?"

"Home-schooled," Rick said. "Right, Hope has them home with her during the day."

Barnacle's face, which always had the look of a potato left too long in the fridge, shriveled further.

Rick had no desire to hear him badmouth the Merritts and so, patting the older man gamely on the shoulder, excused himself.

Wallace Blakely stood nearby holding a pita wedge over paprika-specked hummus.

"Now that is the spicy one," Rick said wryly. "Fair warning."

Blakely ate the chip naked as the men greeted one another. Barnacle was still within arm's length so Rick introduced the two, figuring they were close enough in age and opinion and might hit it off.

"I apologize Val dragged you both into this," Rick said. "After she did my fortieth at the riverboat, we were supposed to cool it with birthday bashes."

Blakely's eyes did a funny flutter behind their glasses. Was that an appraising look?

Nah, Rick thought. Quit being paranoid.

"Thank you for the invitation," Blakely said. "My wife sends her regrets. She wasn't feeling well, bit of a sour stomach." His eyes roamed the party, from hot and cold appetizer plates to the ice luge on the deck outside with liquor bottles arrayed like Olympians along its starting chute. "This is all quite generous. You must be a real social hub."

Again Rick found himself parsing words, guessing whether Blakely was summing up expenses or simply paying them a compliment.

Rick made his next sip a long one. By the time he'd finished, he had decided Val was right.

This was them. This was how they lived, take it or leave it.

"I don't know about 'hub,'" Rick said modestly. "Our friends are awesome. We just give them a chance to be awesome together."

Blakely warmed at this. His face, more of a well-rounded squash to Barnacle's spud, relaxed to a grin. When Rick suggested they head down to the basement for "a tour of the ole brew lab," he followed with gusto.

Barnacle stayed upstairs near the food.

To reach the brewing operation, it was necessary to pass through the finished part of the basement—the kids' domain. The racket was audible from the steps. Halfway down, a bark of "Not my gun!" rose out of the chaos.

Rick told Blakely over his shoulder, "We should be wearing flak jackets. Hopefully they'll give us a warning shot since you're new."

The banker's eyes widened, but he kept moving down the carpeted steps, which Rick noted were free of their usual cat-litter trail thanks to Bonnie. Still, it smelled like short-staffed daycare.

"Dad," Wyatt said before Rick was even fully visible to him, "the littles are ruining my character stats. They keep trying to kill the box."

Reid and his friend, Timmy, were giggling in the middle of a sea of crackers and empty juice boxes. On screen, two hulked-up digital men shot bullets into a wooden chest.

Rick said, "Reid, are you playing your brother's character again?"

The boy whined, "But he lefted the controller on the ground!"

Saying this, Reid kept pressing buttons. One of his elbow pads from practice lay like some exotic garnish in the crackers. The other dangled from his left wrist.

Rick tried remembering when Wyatt and Ava had stopped saying "lefted." They were still saying it their last year before kindergarten, weren't they?

Wyatt said, "I'm gonna be dead last in shooting efficiency against my friends."

Rick sighed. With the help of his trusty parent future-vision, he saw the next moments materializing if he forced Reid off Hivefite. Reid would cling to his dubious logic about Wyatt's having surrendered his controller, and Rick would be dragged into battle with the Sphinx-like six-year-old brain, further radicalized by all the sugar, salt, and gluten (which Val was trying to cut them back on) the kid had been mainlining for the last twenty minutes.

Rick knew he should correct Reid, that it was the proper long-term action. But he turned to his older son instead.

"Does it matter, Bud?"

Wyatt looked up sharply. Rick looked back at him, feeling the full weight of the day. Between their eyes, a whole discourse on Hivefite replayed.

It was nothing but pixels on a screen. It couldn't matter more than friends or family, or actual non-virtual pursuits. If it got to be an obsession, they would stop. They would delete all the accounts—Rick's and Val's, too—and become one of those non-Hivefite families who play Uno Saturday nights.

Wyatt gritted his teeth. He muttered to the younger kids, "Should be playing Frog Hop," but did leave them for the pinball machine.

The boy cut his eyes to Blakely as he went.

Crisis averted, Rick led his VIP guest to the brewing setup. Another dad finished changing a diaper—yep, that explained the smell—and joined them. Rick showed off the chugger pumps and stainless-steel mash-tun, then poured three tasting flights from dark to blonde ales.

Diaper Dad, whose older son played outfield for the Riverdawgs, asked, "How'd you learn all this jazz?"

Rick smiled. "Oh, it's nothing too complicated. If you know Dr. Google, you're halfway there."

As he talked through the components, Rick felt a heady warmth flowing through him. After ten years of giving sickness reports and explaining his philosophy of youth sports ("You expose, but you can't make them love it..."), it was satisfying to be fielding questions about stuff he'd done himself—not with kids, or for kids, but wholly on his own.

Life was good. The party was good—he could hear Val holding court through the basement ceiling, her laugh filling the kitchen. There would be wagers made tonight, and embarrassing quotes coined, and near fistfights. New ventures would hatch. Acquaintances would mature. Spouses would leer at other spouses and kids would pledge hatred of their siblings, and nobody would care too much.

The Glassers had made it. They'd shed the yoke of early childhood. They had come through with great friends, and great kids who could be trusted to mind themselves. There had been tough patches, sure. Nobody relishes being grilled by Disneyland security. But they'd persevered. They had reached the promised land.

In a quiet moment, Barnacle's voice penetrated the ceiling.

"Are they finally getting rid of Haap this season?"

The question, about the Federals' longtime quarterback Jamal Haap, would've been directed at Val, with her ties to the team.

"Absolutely not!" Val said. "They went nine and seven last year. Franklin would've hosted a playoff game if J-Big hadn't blown out his knee."

"Yeah, and why do you suppose that happened?" Barnacle said. "Because he weighs three hundred pounds."

"Those athletes are in phenomenal shape." Val stretched out the rave in a way that would've made Rick uncomfortable if he'd been standing beside her in the kitchen. "Even Jamal. So what if he eats candy bars on the sideline? So what if he's five-foot-nine? Fourth quarter, game on the line, there's still nobody I'd rather have sitting back there in the pocket."

Barnacle grumbled something about that Alabama quarterback who'd be available in next year's draft.

It was amazing people still criticized Jamal Haap, who'd led the Feds to their only Super Bowl appearance just three years ago, who was a Franklin kid himself—a graduate of Falls West—and should've owned the keys to the city.

Haap was loved without reservation on that side of town. Bonnie wouldn't hear a word against him. She owned a number sixteen jersey and cleaned in it every gameday.

Here in the Heights, though, among people like Barnacle, Haap's support was spottier.

Upstairs, Val said, "Mark my words, the Feds will be in Atlanta February third"—the site and date of this season's Super Bowl—"and all of you are watching it with us, out on Kormville Lake."

Rick lost his stomach.

Somebody said, "Is the place supposed to be ready by then?"

"You bet your—" Val swore lustily. "Five bedrooms, and views of the water from every single one. The listing agent said it slept fourteen, but if J-Big makes it happen? I'll be pissed if less than thirty of you guys stay with us."

Wallace Blakely was staring into his Shawnee Stout, but his ears pricked up at this.

"That's probably enough nitty-gritty," Rick said over the hammering of his own heart. "I, uh—maybe we should head upstairs, rejoin the festivities?"

Blakely and Diaper Dad seemed confused by the abrupt end to their lesson but did follow Rick back through the finished part of the basement.

Rick scrambled to piece together the situation. Had Blakely caught that? Would he have connected Val's utterance to Tramp Bar?

Surely not. Surely he didn't have their whole balance sheet memorized, such that some offhand reference to an unfamiliar lake property would trip alarms in his head and make him think their insolvency was imminent.

But what if the conversation kept going? What if it went deeper? What if Val, as she was wont to do, launched into some orgasmic account of how that alive Kormville air felt on your skin, stepping out of the custom-shaped hot tub at three a.m.?

Rick closed the door tightly after the men, then gauged whether the kitchen conversation could still be heard. He didn't think so. Hivefite was pulsing through the surround sound system—bangs, grunts, robotic kill announcements.

Maybe he should hang out here for a second, let the lake house topic expire on its own.

Blakely was eying Reid, who'd stuck the joystick part of his controller in one nostril.

Not too many seconds, Rick thought.

He found Wyatt at the pinball machine. "Bud, what do you know about Ava?"

Wyatt kept jamming flippers on the machine that'd been his birthday present. "I know she needs to stop making glitter hand sanitizer in the bathroom so I can brush my teeth without gagging."

"Agreed. But how about tonight? I haven't seen her."

"She's upstairs with Maddy."

"Maddy P or Maddy A?"

"A. Maddy P isn't here."

Rick clapped him on the arm, making a happy wince as Wyatt's ball nestled in the triple-score hole.

Ava was Rick's hardest child to figure. Once during second grade, he had picked her up from a playdate and been told by the mom that Ava had been part of a group that'd heckled an outcast—pulling hair, purposefully ruining the girl's craft.

In the very same month, Rick had watched her lead a timid teammate around the soccer field in their first rec league game, hand-in-hand, making a soft "O" of her mouth every time the girl managed to put a shoe on the ball.

Which was the real Ava? Assuming the playdate heckling had even occurred—that mom, whose sons Rick had coached, lived for drama and tended to conflate her kids' conflicts for effect.

Rick was afraid he knew the answer. Ava was both. It was as true for children as for adults: in the wrong circumstance, anyone can make an unflattering choice.

So she's with Maddy A.

One of the Maddys had pinned down her family's cat and given it purple cheeks with permanent marker. Rick thought it was Maddy P.

Leaving Wyatt to pinball, he detoured briefly to chug a double IPA—his strongest at 9.7 percent—then returned to Blakely's side. The alcohol dulled the all-over ache he felt from lacrosse, from the extended walk 'n' talk tour he'd given distributors at lunch, from those punishing pretend-bull rides Reid still asked for.

Blakely was watching the basement chaos.

"It ain't always pretty," Rick said, feeling his social inhibitions dulled, too. "But it works out in the end."

Reid burst from his chair to protest his virtual death, upsetting the crackers. Orange dust showered the carpet.

"Mostly," Rick added.

Blakely chuckled. Rick helped Reid scoop the mess into a paper cup, then ushered the loan officer upstairs. Diaper Dad stayed behind. He and his older son, the Riverdawg, had taken up controllers and logged into Hivefite.

"Adam, you'll send up a flare if overrun?" Rick called back.

The dad raised a thumbs-up without looking from the screen.

The basement stairs spilled out to an empty stretch of hall near the study.

Wallace Blakely took advantage of the quiet to ask, "How are those building improvements coming down at Tramp Bar?"

Rick, who'd been listening ahead for the kitchen conversation, said, "Solid! All the woodwork's done, the trampolines are operational. Had a little hiccup with the springs—first ones we ordered were too loud—but we're good now."

Blakely nodded.

Rick said, "We did add that second sump pump, too. Now the Shawnee can flood all she wants, no worries."

This wasn't true. If the Shawnee River jumped its banks, Tramp Bar and every other establishment on the Falls side would be opening its doors through several feet of standing water. But that hadn't happened since the flood of forty-two.

"And the signage?" Blakely said. "Were the builders able to extend that Front Street pole by the nine feet we discussed?"

Rick choked at the banker's recall of the exact number of feet, then raised his beer in a stall. Franklin Construction Group—about the crookedest outfit in the city, Rick had gathered in his brief business career—wanted fifteen thousand dollars to do the job. Something about the sediment type underneath.

"We're still, uh, hammering out terms with FCG," Rick said. "Their schedule's tough to crack. Hopefully it gets done by opening night."

"The bank feels strongly that lack of visibility factored into the last restaurant's failure," Blakely said. "The last three restaurants' failures."

The Tramp Bar site had gained a reputation around town as being snakebitten. A Chinese restaurant, a liquor store, and two flavors of bistro had all folded within five months of opening. The monthly payments had been quite affordable for just this reason, but the history had turned into a sticking point at the Board of Directors review.

Rick believed the history was meaningless. The previous restaurants had been straight food joints, whereas Tramp Bar had specific elements to draw people in: trampolines for the kids, in-house brews for the parents. He had made this point at length to the board earlier in the spring—in a presentation that'd been the single most harrowing event of his adult life.

Yet here Blakely was, asking about pole heights.

"I should check in with Val," Rick said. "Dunno about yours, but when I leave my wife unattended too long at parties? I usually end up pledged to cook for a crowd or do manual labor."

Blakely lightened up—the quip must've found the mark—and they headed toward the kitchen.

"...dock two jet skis or the big ass pontoon, but not both," Val was saying. "Which I feel is infuriating and wasn't communicated to us at all by the agent."

Still?

Rick's front foot hung in the air, heart stuck in his throat as he considered diverting them again. Where? Back to the basement? Out to the deck where the ice luge was firing up?

No—it was too late. Any more funny business would be obvious.

Somebody asked Val if there was still room to negotiate terms.

Rick, passing through the door jams, saw Val lick her lips.

"There's always room to negotiate," she said.

Rick woozled his eyes as Blakely shuffled in behind. "Boy," he said, "those scallops were amazing last weekend, weren't they?"

The group milling in the kitchen stared at him like he'd grown a third eyeball. Alejandro and the woman beside him broke off a laugh. George Huang belched.

Val's face froze. Her gaze shot to Blakely, then back to Rick.

"Oh," she said. "Yes. Yes, those scallops were amazing—I'm never ordering bay again now that I've tasted the ones from the sea."

Rick didn't dare look back for Blakely's reaction.

"Scallops" was the Glassers' conversational safe word. Whenever some guest brought up a gauche topic or a civil disagreement veered into Dangertown—inevitable given how many parties they hosted—one of them could utter "scallops," and the other knew to help guide the discussion onto tamer ground.

Politics was a typical culprit. Often Barnacle was involved. Most recently Val had cried "scallops" when her coworker, in a group with Hope Merritt, had seemed on the verge of disparaging cloth diapers—which the Merritts had used zealously with both children.

Now Val's grin was tight as a bowstring.

Had Blakely understood? she asked with her eyes.

Rick blinked. Unclear.

Val said, "Mr. Blakely, come on in! Meet the cool kids of the party. He wasn't geeking out on brewery stuff, was he? You'd think he'd be sick of it, as much time as spends slaving away down there."

In a whisk of silk blouse and red fingernails, she ushered the banker into the kitchen and introduced him around. Wallace, Alejandro. Alejandro, Wallace. George, your office is downtown by the proposed stadium site, too, yes?

Blakely accepted each hand with a prim shake. He was like a turtle, swiveling about hopelessly in Val's swarm of colorful insects.

Finally Val gave her friend Gina a meaningful glance, then tugged Rick away by the sleeve.

She locked them in the laundry room.

"Sorry—yikes, I wasn't even thinking about the loans!" She swore, invoking her favorite self-inflicted sex act. "Still, though. He didn't connect the dots. No chance."

Their chests were touching, his going bip-bip-bip through flannel, the tops of her breasts exposed and heaving in a low-cut top. Rick's right leg felt shorter than his left. He looked down and saw he was stepping on a bath towel.

"No chance." He tried convincing himself in the mirror of his wife's face, "You could've been talking about anything, right? A place your parents were buying."

"Exactly."

"He's not here on some spy mission."

"Totally not. He's breaking bread, enjoying our hospitality."

"Right." Rick couldn't stop watching Val's neck, writhing in place with each word. "If we succeed, he succeeds."

"Of course."

"Why wouldn't he want that?"

"Of course he wants that."

"People are good," Rick said, tired and drunk, half-falling into his wife. "People root for each other."

"For sure." Val squinted dismissively, as though not a single sane individual on the planet could arrive at a different conclusion. "How're the kids doing? Okay?"

Rick took a moment changing gears. "Yeah. Yeah, they...were good, I think."

He took a mental count.

One in the basement.

Two in the basement.

Three...maybe upstairs.

"Hey," he said, "do you remember which Maddy colored her cat purple? Was it Maddy A or Maddy P?"

Val's eyes, gorgeous almonds, turned inward. "Was it a cat? I have gerbil in my head."

Husband and wife looked at one another in the cramped, crazy space. The air was gnarly from a load of laundry Rick had run last night and forgotten to dry. He could barely make out Val's expression—only one of four sockets in the fixture overhead had a live bulb—and couldn't tell if she was worried about Ava, or Blakely, or just beat from pitching anti-inflammatory drugs to the Feds' medical staff all day.

He didn't honestly know his own thoughts. The low-grade headache and ear throbbing were long gone, but swirling crosscurrents in his brain made focus difficult.

Had Gina handled Blakely? Did Diaper Dad's older son play right or left field for the Riverdawgs? How long did they have before the ice luge melted? What, an hour? Two?

Was this how Reid felt in those moments his teacher said he "seemed to get a bit lost"—overwhelmed, ten questions hitting his tender brain at once?

Cutting through all this confused speculation was a hard, bright urge. Val must've felt the same because now they crashed together kissing, clutching, fumbling at belts. A sheet of dryer lint affixed itself to Rick's head. He felt the static raise a tuft of hair. Val reached out and poked in the push-button lock.

For fifteen reckless minutes, they didn't care.