“I’m not sixteen years old anymore, Dad,” Marcus snapped.

“No,” Arthur agreed.

“You are thirty-four.

You have a wife recovering from major abdominal surgery, and two three-week-old sons asleep upstairs.

So sit down, and start acting as though your age is supposed to mean something.” His voice had dropped, on that last sentence, into a register I had never heard from him at a family dinner — the register of a man who had once given orders that people’s lives depended on, and had not forgotten how.

Marcus’s phone buzzed on the counter, and the preview lit the screen where we could all see it. Rachel: I’m sick of this.