Will leans out of the driver’s-side window toward his wife. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he says.

Her dark glasses show him the houses on their side of the block, greatly reduced and warped by the convexity of each lens. The fancy wrought-iron bars on their neighbor’s windows, the bright plastic backboard of the Little Tikes basketball hoop one door down, the white climbing rose, suddenly and profusely in bloom, on the trellis by their own mailbox: it’s as if he were studying one of those jewel-like miniatures painted in Persia during the sixteenth century; the longer Will looks, the more tiny details he finds.

“Did you remember to bring pictures?” Carole asks.

He points to an envelope on the seat beside him. “I mentioned the pool at the hotel?”

“Several times.”

“Babysitting services? Pay-per-view?”

“Come on, Will,” Carole says, “don’t do this to me.”

“Do what?”

“Make me feel guilty.” Her bra strap has slipped out from the armhole of her sleeveless dress, down one shoulder. Without looking, she tucks it back where it belongs.

“You know I’d make it up to you,” he tells her. She smiles, raises her eyebrows so they appear above the frames of her sunglasses.

“And how might you do that?” she asks him.

“By being your sex slave.”

She reaches behind his neck to adjust his collar. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she says.

“What’s that?”

“You already are my sex slave.”

“Oh,” ...