“Mom, who is that?”

Franny fanned herself with the brochure. “Does he offer lessons? Here? By any chance?”

The woman shrugged. “Sí. More expensive, but yes.” She turned her chair toward her computer screen and hit a few buttons. “He had a cancellation tomorrow afternoon, four p.m.?”

Sylvia watched her mother quickly dig through her purse, swearing a few times before finally landing on her wallet. “Yes,” Franny said, not looking at Sylvia or the receptionist, only the photo in the brochure. “Yes, that will do.” After she signed her name, she turned around and walked calmly out the door, leaving Sylvia standing at the counter with an open mouth. “Weren’t you in a hurry?” she called from outside. Sylvia made a face at the woman behind the counter and hurried back to the car, unsure of what she’d just witnessed, but positive it was something she could tease her mother about for decades to come.

Franny refused to say anything about Antoni Vert other than that he’d been a tennis player in her day, Spain’s last best hope before Nando’s aggressive rise, but Joan was more forthcoming. He and Sylvia were theoretically working by the pool, but really they were just eating a giant bowl of grapes and an equally giant bowl of Franny’s homemade guacamole, despite the fact that Sylvia had teased her for making Mexican food in Spain, as if all Spanish-speaking cultures were the same. Joan sat with his legs crossed, his sunglasses perched on the top of his head. Sylvia sat with her feet in the pool.

“He was very famous,” Joan said. “All the women loved him. My mother, she loved him. Everyone. He was not as good as Filani, but he was more handsome. In the early eighties. Very long hair.”

“Huh.” Sylvia kicked her legs back and forth. “I mean, how interesting. My mother basically had a heart attack, but not as much of a heart attack as she’s going to have when she tries to actually play tennis.” The pool water splashed onto her legs, which she hoped looked carefree, like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shot, and not like she had just peed down her thigh.

Joan laughed, and then tossed a grape into his mouth. “What about you, Sylvia? No boyfriend at home in New York?”

Sylvia dunked a chip into the guacamole and then lowered it gently onto her tongue. It was hard to try to be seductive when they were talking about her actual life. She shook her head and chewed. “Everyone in New York sucks. Or at least everyone at my school. Do you say that, sucks? What’s the word for that?” She swallowed.

“Me tienen hasta los huevos. It means I’ve had it up to my balls. Same idea.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me tienen hasta los huevos.”

A small airplane flew across the sky, a trail of white smoke behind it, a blank skywritten message. Sylvia watched as the thin white line bisected the otherwise perfectly clear blue sky. It looked like a math equation—x plus y equals z. Avocado plus onion plus cilantro equaled guacamole. Skin plus sun equaled burn. Her father plus her mother equaled her.

It had been a weird spring at home. Franny was Franny, like always, the central figure in her own solar system, the maypole around which the rest of the world had to dance and twirl. It was Jim who had been acting strange. It didn’t make any sense when he’d suddenly retired. Gallant was his oxygen, his entertainment, his everything. Sylvia would wander through the house and find him sitting in a new room, or in the garden, staring off into space. Instead of interrupting him, as she normally would, she would avoid him. He looked so deep in thought that disturbing him seemed as dangerous as waking a sleepwalker. That was before she knew. The longer he was home, the more conversations she could hear through the hundred-year-old walls and floors. It came in pieces at first, a few words louder than the rest, and then all at once, when her mother decided that it was too hard to pretend that things were hunky-dory. Franny had put it like this: Her father had slept with someone, and it was a Problem that they were trying to figure out, as if the whole thing could be solved with a giant calculator. Sylvia didn’t know who the woman was, but she knew that she was young. Of course, they were always young. Jim had not been present for the conversation—it was better that way for everyone.

Parents got stranger when you got older, that was obvious. You could no longer take for granted that everyone else’s family worked exactly as yours did, with the bathroom doors open or shut, with the pinch of sugar in the tomato sauce, with the off-key but effective bedtime lullaby. Sylvia had spent the last few months watching her mother ignore her father unless she was scolding him, and Jim was not someone who took well to scolding. Sylvia sat in her chair at the kitchen table and watched them silently spar. She wondered if it had always been this way, or whether it was only her more mature eyes that recognized the cold breeze between her mother and father. Sometimes in books she would come across a mention of his-and-hers bedrooms—old movies, too; TCM was full of women waking up alone in their dressing gowns—and think that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. What were parents anyway, except two people who had once thought they were the smartest people in the world? They were a delusional species, as tiny-brained as dinosaurs. Sylvia didn’t think she ever wanted to get married or have children. Forget about the ozone layer, and tsunamis—what about dinner? It was all too much.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m finding all this sunshine very depressing.” She pulled one leg out of the pool and then the other, watching them drip dark spots onto the concrete.

Joan picked up the bowls of food and followed her into the dining room.

It was siesta time. They’d all been delighted to acclimate to the custom, and now everyone dragged themselves to their separate corners right after lunch, eyelids already heavy. Carmen slept on her back, while Bobby curled up like a seashell next to her, his mouth open. Jim fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, a book on his chest. Sylvia slept on her stomach, her face turned to one side like a swimmer. Lawrence slept like a child, with the covers up to his neck. Only Charles and Franny were still awake, and they were in the master bathroom, Franny in the tub and Charles on the closed lid of the toilet.

Gemma had all the best bath products, of course: shampoos and conditioners, exfoliating scrubs, bars of soap with sprigs of French lavender embedded in them, bath gels, bubbles, loofahs, pumice stones, the works. Franny planned to soak for an hour, even if it meant using all the hot water in Pigpen. The tub wasn’t very long, but neither was Franny, and her straight legs just barely touched the far end.

“So?” Charles said. He was flipping through a magazine, one of Sylvia’s trashy ones from the airplane. “How’s it been?”

Franny had a washcloth over her eyes. “You’ve seen it.”

“I mean when it’s just the two of you.” He turned the page to a spread of women in sequined evening gowns.

“It’s like this,” Franny said, and then kept her mouth shut for a beat. “It’s like nothing. It’s like I want to punch him in the eyeball almost as much as I want him to actually apologize. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve truly considered murdering him in his sleep.”

“So you’re not mad?” The next page was the entire contents of an actress’s purse, spilled out and identified piece by piece. Chewing gum, a nail file, some makeup, a mirror, another pair of shoes, headphones, a BlackBerry. “What does she read when she gets bored?” he said to himself.