“And how about you?” he said. “It being a Friday night. Any plans? A date, maybe?”

Jonas rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we’ve all got big dates,” he said. “And then there’s the church social, and then we’re all going to the soda fountain for a cherry phosphate.”

Cynthia worried lately that Adam and Jonas weren’t as close as they used to be, and while Adam didn’t know about that-was it even healthy for a teenage son to be all that close to his father?-it was true that they were growing conspicuously unlike each other. At the same time, there was a kind of Spartan streak in his son that Adam recognized and respected. He’d gone vegan, for instance, which, even though it was not something Adam would have done in a million years, was certainly a form of discipline in the interests of the body. Still, having spent his own high school years as a virtual president of the mainstream, he couldn’t help but find Jonas’s taste for exile a little hard to understand.

He moved one pile of records from a chair to the floor and sat down. “So, punk,” he said. “That was before my time, even. I didn’t know you were interested in that.” His son nodded, like some sort of scholar, less a nod of agreement than a nod to indicate that it was a worthy question. “That was probably the last really genuine thing to happen in pop music,” Jonas said. “It was exciting while it lasted, though, which was about five minutes.”

“But people your age still listen to it?”

“People my age,” Jonas said, “are mostly morons.”

“Wait a minute, though. Aren’t you in a band? The band is still together, right? I assume you’re not playing old Sex Pistols songs?”

“That is kind of a sore subject right now,” Jonas said.

Adam held up his hand to indicate that they would speak of it no more. He picked up an album by Flatt & Scruggs; he didn’t know the first thing about them but for some reason, gazing at their suits and crew cuts and formal smiles, he was struck by a kind of pity for them, because they were so dead. “There wasn’t a lot of music in our house growing up,” he said. “The stereo was like a battlefield. Your uncle Conrad and I kept breaking the rules-mostly about volume; I think the rule was no higher than four-and then the ban would come, no more music in the house for a day, a week, two weeks. We couldn’t help it. We’d hear something on the radio, and when it got to the point where you couldn’t stand waiting a few hours for it to come on again, we’d go out and buy it at Walgreens or someplace, and if it was any good obviously we’d turn it up. Then we’d forget to turn it back down, and a day later Dad would flip on the radio to hear Paul Harvey, and it would come on at ear-splitting volume.”

Jonas nodded as if this story served to confirm something he’d known all along. “Music sucks now,” he said. “It all comes out of a factory. It’s not about anything except wanting to be famous. How people can even listen to it is beyond me.”

Adolescence was all about overstatement; still, it made Adam sad to hear his son talking this way. “Well, cheer up,” he said. “Maybe punk is poised for a comeback.”

Jonas shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That world is gone for good.”

In the winter Robin had started showing up at the Moreys a lot more often. Not always with April either, or even preceded by a phone call; one night she showed up at their front door so drunk you could barely understand her, and Cynthia, after whispering to her for a few seconds, let her right in. There was a while where she was basically living there. April’s feelings about this kept turning out to be the wrong ones: when she wondered aloud why Robin continued to get away with murder in a way that April never could, her mother took her out on the balcony and told her that Robin was being physically abused at home, that one night at the Moreys’ Robin had taken Cynthia into the bathroom and shut the door and showed her a series of cuts and red marks on her stomach and chest that had been left there by the power cord from a laptop. April acted totally shocked when the shameful truth was that she had heard that rumor before and thought that it was bullshit, that that kind of thing didn’t really happen to anyone she knew. In her least generous moments she had even wondered if maybe Robin was amping up all these stories about how bad things were at her home, not just for drama’s sake but because life at the Moreys’ was like some kind of spa for her: she came and went as she pleased, ate what she wanted, either studied or didn’t according to her whim. So April had to deal with her guilt over that. On top of which she felt disappointed and confused that Robin, who was her friend after all, had been moved to confess all this to her mother but not to her.

There was even one night when Robin’s father had shown up at their door, unannounced, to take his daughter back home. That was some drama. The doorman called upstairs and said that he was down there in the lobby, demanding to come up. Cynthia said no. Two minutes later the doorman called again. By this time all five of them, the Moreys and Robin, were gathered in the foyer staring at the video from the security camera. Robin’s father was just standing there in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets. “He says he isn’t going anywhere,” the doorman murmured into the phone. He seemed torn between excitement and fear that some sort of incident might imperil his job. “Ask if there’s anyone else down there with him,” Cynthia said to Adam, and when the answer came back no, Cynthia said to let him up.

They told Robin to go downstairs to April’s room but she wouldn’t; instead she withdrew into the living room, as far as she could get from the front door with her sight line unimpeded, as if her father’s reach were impossibly long. He was a good twenty years older than Adam and Cynthia and that seemed to sharpen his contempt for them. “May I come in?” he said on the threshold, and April’s jaw fell when her mother answered no.

When he made out Robin in the room beyond the foyer, standing behind one of the couches, he sighed. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You are fifteen years old. You do not have our permission to be here. Get your things.”

Robin didn’t reply. “She has our permission to be here,” Cynthia said. “You might ask yourself why she feels safer here than she does in her own home.”

At first he ignored her, his eyes still on his daughter. Eventually he turned on Cynthia his most withering look. It was interesting to April that her father didn’t even try to come between them. Most husbands probably would have, even if they weren’t sure why. But her dad obviously felt, as she did, that if anybody needed protecting in this scenario, it was the older man, with his combed-back silver hair and his steel glasses.

“I recognize you,” he said to Cynthia. “All the parents talk about you. You like to play at being one of the girls. You’re the youngest mother there and yet the one least able to deal with getting old. I don’t know what kind of fantasy this is for you, but it couldn’t be of less interest to me.”

“You can see how eager your child is to have anything to do with you,” Cynthia said. “Kudos. As long as she feels like she’s in danger, she is welcome here. Her choice. Period.”

Even if you knew that parents sometimes talked to one another that way, it still seemed incredibly transgressive to overhear it. April turned and caught Jonas’s eye.

“She is fifteen,” Robin’s father repeated. “It’s a legal matter. If you won’t let her go, the police will have to get involved. I’ve lived in New York a long time and I know a lot of people.”

“Oh, you’ve said the magic word,” Cynthia said, smiling. She took a step closer to him. “Police. If you want to go there, we’ll go there. I took pictures of what she looked like last time she came over here.”

Something changed then, not on his face so much as behind it, but still April could see it. He knew he couldn’t intimidate Cynthia so he took one more shot at intimidating his daughter, calling to her over Cynthia’s shoulder to say that she had been forgiven for a lot of things, but she would not be forgiven for this. After he was gone the five of them stayed up almost all night, just watching TV in the media room, waiting for whatever would happen next without quite knowing what that would be. But nothing else happened at all.