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    “You get out, too,” he said to me. “You’re covered in it!”
    I nodded. Batted sad Bambi eyes at him.
    “I can help you clean,” I said.
    After my father demanded to know where the cleaning supplies were, he put me to work with the paper towels. Mom got out of the car and talked with dad. It was a grown up talk. She was reminding him how nice things had gone so far.
    “I like to be on time,” was all he said before he walked back over and inspected my progress.
    I had thought I had done a good job. I tried to do a good job.
    It didn’t rate with dad.
    He finished, going over spots that I already knew were clean.
    I wanted to ask him if he loved Jenny. Because if he did then it would add a little more victory to my plan.
    But I kept quiet until it was clean.
    Then they put Rebecca in the backseat (after Jenny refused) and mom sat in the middle, while Kristen rode up front with the window cracked.
    We left a bag of litter and vomit on the side of the road.

DAD:
     
    Sigh.
    Sigh.
    Sigh.
    And they say it’s only the first sip of beer that induces the endorphins in my brain. No other sip will taste as good. I don’t believe that. I’m going to stop at four, but I’ve earned them. I’ve earned every single beer and if Mandy wants to tell me I’ve had too much, then she can drive next time.
    I’m not an alcoholic.
    This is not whiskey.
    “It wasn’t that bad,” Mandy said, as she smoothed out the ground before she set down a blanket. She must’ve picked up a dozen rocks trying to make it perfect. It was a waste of time. In two seconds, she’d sit down and try to get comfortable, but she wouldn’t be able to.
    I’d waste a breath telling her that’s how the ground is supposed to feel.
    “I’ve got a few more in the cooler,” I said. “They’ve all got my name on them.”
    “It’s actually been nice. Even with the throw up incident. I think they’re finally getting it,” Mandy said. “We’re a family. Just like we always wanted to be.”
    “We made it to the second day last time,” I said.
    “Don’t spoil it, Ben.”
    “That’s why I’m having a beer. It’s celebratory. And besides, no incident doesn’t mean I didn’t drive the four hours not anticipating one. I think it might be easier to get me to run into a burning building than to chance another drive with this lot. This is probably why my father smoked a pack anytime we were around.”
    “Yeah, but then you won’t be around for when they have kids and we can really enjoy children. Kids are so much cooler when they’re not yours. That’s what my mother always reminds me, when she calls ours perfect little angels.”
    “I wished you’d told me that ten years ago.”
    Mandy knew I was joking, but she still put on her little show of shock just to see if I’d take her seriously.
    Then she said, “You’re a good dad.”
    “Then why do they all think that I hate them?”
    Mandy manufactured the kind of laugh some chairman of the PTA had on standby, like I’d requested that students should be allowed to read Twain unedited. She said, “I spend a lot more time with them. They treat me like a laundry machine. You think I get any gratitude? You come home and give them a soda or say they can have pie when they didn’t eat their dinner. You’re they’re hero, Ben.”
    “Except when you say, ‘tell your father what you did today.’ Do you know what fear looks like? I terrify them.”
    “No. You don’t. They are just afraid of disappointing you. Don’t you remember what it was like to be a kid?”
    “I do. And my father terrified me. I fell in love with my mother because for most of my teen years, she left my father out of it. He came home none the wiser that Charlie Norris and I’d been caught smoking cigarettes under the bleachers or that I got a speeding ticket one night trying to make curfew—after a date with you!”
    Mandy laughed. “I remember that.”
    “I just want them to be happy. I didn’t have a