A boy is eating dinner with his father. He feels bad for how much he hates listening to him eat. He tries to remember his father’s more gracious moments, like how, when he was younger, the boy told Santa he wanted his own apartment, and his father heard the wish beneath the wish, the desire for privacy, and installed a lock on his door. The boy excuses himself from the dinner table. He goes upstairs to call his friend, to tell him he sold a fake relic on the Internet for almost three hundred dollars. The man who bought it is overly thankful, which makes the boy feel guilty. He decides to give it to the man for free. The man gushes further, overwhelmed with gratitude. His father intercepts one of the man’s thank you cards. Because he doesn’t know about the item his son sold and because of the card’s religious notes, he assumes that the boy just misses church. They go: the boy, his father and his father’s girlfriend. Afterward, at brunch, the girlfriend tells the boy they’re all going to go hiking at one of her favorite trails. “If you hate it,” she says, “you never have to do it again.” She offers him her chapstick, and he wonders, “How chapped would his lips have to be to take a smudge of it from her mouthy tube?” He realizes that she’s going to become his stepmother. He feels both disappointment and understanding toward his father. He thinks about how her presence will change their home: “She would install a better shower curtain. She would paint the walls. She’d bring her macramé plant holders and the set of dishes made by her ex-husband the ceramicist, whom she still loved, who loved her, it was only that he was gay. One day…they’d all have a meal together.” They go hiking. The boy feels dizzy as his father’s girlfriend discovers a sombrero under his shoe. “He felt sick. Her face near his face wobbled like a hologram.” He tells her and his father that he’s happy for them, and they laugh in a way that he finds condescending. They talk about how he might be dehydrated from drinking too much coffee, and he contemplates throwing the sombrero off the ledge. Instead, he steps off the ledge and then is falling. Someone tries to lift him, maybe his father. “He hears a woman screaming” in the background. Aware of the scene he’s causing, he makes a face “for the back of the house.”