“Like what?” asked Rosie, Fat Charlie’s fiancée, one evening, when Fat Charlie, who normally did not talk about his father, had attempted, stumblingly, to explain why he believed that simply inviting his father to their upcoming wedding would be a horrendously bad idea. They were in a small wine bar in South London at the time. Fat Charlie had long been of the opinion that four thousand miles and the Atlantic Ocean were both good things to keep between himself and his father.

“Well—” said Fat Charlie, and he remembered a parade of indignities, each one of which made his toes curl involuntarily. He settled upon one of them. “Well, when I changed schools, when I was a kid, my dad made a point of telling me how much he had always looked forward to Presidents’ Day, when he was a boy, because it’s the law that on Presidents’ Day, the kids who go to school dressed as their favorite presidents get a big bag of candy.”

“Oh. That’s a nice law,” said Rosie. “I wish we had something like that in England.” Rosie had never been out of the U.K., if you didn’t count a Club18-30 holiday to an island in, she was fairly certain, the Mediterranean. She had warm brown eyes and a good heart, even if geography was not her strongest suit.

“It’s not a nice law,” said Fat Charlie. “It’s not a law at all. He made it up. Most states don’t even have school on Presidents’ Day, and even for the ones that do, there is no tradition of going to school on Presidents’ Day dressed as your favorite president. Kids dressed as presidents do not get big bags of candy by an act of Congress, nor is your popularity in the years ahead, all through middle school and high school, decided entirely by which president you decided to dress as—the average kids dress as the obvious presidents, the Lincolns and Washingtons and Jeffersons, but the ones who would become popular, they dressed as John Quincy Adams or Warren Gamaliel Harding, or someone like that. And it’s bad luck to talk about it before the day. Or rather it isn’t, but he said it was.”