“What do you do with your friends?”
Patrick grew wistful. It had been a long time since he had spent any time with his friends. “We drink rosé and talk about Best Actress Oscar winners. Is that what you do?”
“No.” Maisie drew her chin into her neck until it all but disappeared.
“Not even with Audra Brackett? It’s fun. Like, who is your favorite Best Actress winner?”
“I don’t know.” Grant shrugged comically, as if he should actually have an opinion.
“Well, that’s a bit of a trick question, because there’s really only one correct answer and that’s Faye Dunaway, 1976.”
“That’s before we were born,” Maisie protested.
“That’s before I was born, but I still know this stuff!” Patrick paused, doing a quick calculation in his head to see if that was a lie. “I would also accept Isabelle Huppert, 2016, even though they awarded her Oscar to Emma Stone.”
Grant rested his head on the counter as if he were terminally bored. “We want to do something.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, what is there to do?”
“You guys visited once before. You don’t remember what there is to do?”
“I was just a baby!” Grant protested.
“Dinosaurs!” Maisie bounced up and down on her stool with excitement. Patrick had taken them to see the Cabazon dinosaurs featured in the movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Together they looked at the giant T. rex and brontosaurus sculptures and dug in warm sand for “fossils” （fake bones you could trade in for prizes）。 The wind had caused the sand to kick up in their faces, but there was a water table where you could “mine” for gold, and it was there Patrick learned how much kids responded to water. Whatever the activity （washlet spritzing, for instance）， the wetter the better.
“I was thinking something closer to home. Maybe we could swim in the pool and then this afternoon we could play a game?”
“POOL!” Grant hollered.
“You can each pick a pool float and I’ll inflate them while you dip yourselves in sunscreen. I’ve got a flamingo, a unicorn, a Jeff Koons balloon dog, a slice of pizza. A diamond ring, but that’s meant to be ironic.”
“Why do you have tho many?”
“For you guys, silly. Also, companies just send me this garbage because I have a pool and a lot of Instagram followers. I even have a lobster your mother gave me one time. A New England thing, I guess. To remind me of my roots. But that’s more Maine than Connecticut.”
“Can I put my face in the water?” Grant asked.
“If you don’t, I’ll put it in for you.”
“Can we bring the toilet?”
“What? No. Why? Pee in the bushes like a normal person.”
“To squirt each other with.”
“Are you crazy? It’s attached to the floor with a wax seal. But we’ll get Super Soakers or something later and you can squirt each other to your heart’s content. Until then, we’ll use the hose.”
Grant grinned wide, all teeth （minus one） and gums.
“Just put your plate in the sink.”
Grant jumped down from his barstool, collected his plate, and gave his uncle a big hug. “Thanks, GUP.”
“It’s settled, then,” Patrick said, making a mental note of Maisie’s nonreaction to it all. “And don’t get syrup on me.”
* * *
“Where’s your sister?” Patrick asked as he and Grant stood in their swimsuits, towels flung over their shoulders. Grant had streaks of sunscreen down his arms and across his face as Patrick tried his best to cover him in the lotion Greg had packed in their suitcase. The sunscreen was specifically designed for kids （it had a blue lizard on the bottle）， but was total garbage as far as he could tell because it was impossible to rub in—Grant’s arms looked as if they’d been painted like fence pickets. And if that weren’t awful enough, the kid wore these green goggles tightly around his face, making him look like an albino gecko.
“She doesn’t want to thwim.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t want to swim? She loves swimming. On your last visit, we had to drag her out of the pool just to—What is wrong with this lotion?”
“What do you mean?”
“I should not have to touch you this much. It seems inappropriate.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Just . . . nothing.” Patrick gave up on the chore and took to rubbing the last bit of lotion off his hands onto his towel. “Maybe we’ll just stay inside for the rest of the summer.”