“Boys and girls dress up as presidents?”

“Oh yes. Boys and girls. So I spent the week before Presidents’ Day reading everything there was to read about presidents in the World Book Encyclopedia, trying to choose the right one.”

“Didn’t you ever suspect that he was pulling your leg?”

Fat Charlie shook his head. “It’s not something you think about, when my dad starts to work you over. He’s the finest liar you’ll ever meet. He’s convincing.”

Rosie took a sip of her Chardonnay. “So which President did you go to school as?”

“Taft. He was the twenty-seventh president. I wore a brown suit my father had found somewhere, with the legs all rolled up and a pillow stuffed down the front. I had a painted-on moustache. My dad took me to school himself that day. I walked in so proudly. The other kids just screamed and pointed, and somewhere in there I locked myself in a cubicle in the boys’ room and cried. They wouldn’t let me go home to change. I went through the day like that. It was Hell.”

“You should have made something up,” said Rosie. “You were going to a costume party afterwards or something. Or just told them the truth.”

“Yeah,” said Fat Charlie meaningfully and gloomily, remembering.

“What did your dad say, when you got home?”

“Oh, he hooted with laughter. Chuckled and chortled and, and chittered and all that. Then he told me that maybe they didn’t do that Presidents’ Day stuff anymore. Now, why didn’t we go down to the beach together and look for mermaids?”

“Look for—mermaids?”

“We’d go down to the beach, and walk along it, and he’d be as embarrassing as any human being on the face of this planet has ever been—he’d start singing, and he’d start doing a shuffling sort of sand-dance on the sand, and he’d just talk to people as he went—people he didn’t even know, people he’d never met, and I hated it, except he told me there were mermaids out there in the Atlantic, and if I looked fast enough and sharp enough, I’d see one.