Even as he asked me this question, he was loading his plate with fried rice and cashew chicken and some kind of honeyed shrimp, and his eyes were roving the restaurant as though he was looking for someone he was expecting to meet. “No,” I said, “I moved here when I was eleven.”

“See?” he said, and smiled at me. “Everybody’s moved here. Nobody is from North Shore because everybody wants to move here, I mean, except her mother.” He gestured at Bunny with his thumb. She sipped from her Shirley Temple, sucking hard on the straw, then grew frustrated, pulled up the straw, showed us the cherry stuck on the end of it, and laughed like a kid.

Her father continued, “They were from here, very serious people, her dad was a machinist for Boeing. Used to have this huge shop in his garage, the guy could fabricate anything.”

It took me a moment to track that we were discussing Bunny’s mother’s father, Bunny’s grandfather. “Is he still around?” I asked.

“He passed,” Ray said. “But he lived a good life. Yeah, he passed when Bunny was, what were you?”

“Nine,” Bunny said.

“Helluva thing, being able to make things with your hands. That’s a real loss in the digital world, I think. Making things. Don’t you think so?”

The dinner continued on in this vein, Bunny occasionally queuing up her dad to tell an interesting story, almost as though he were a jukebox and she were playing me her favorite songs. Occasionally she would try to steer him away from dangerous topics: “I’m not against immigrants, but I’m just saying they should come here legally—” and she would pipe up, “Tell him about the pool, tell him about the pool you’re going to put in,” and he would seamlessly switch tracks and begin telling me about the Olympic-size swimming pool he had convinced the city council was vital to the town’s growth. “I mean, think about it, how are we going to have kids that grow up to be Olympic swimmers if we don’t even have a damn pool for them to swim in?”

Both Bunny and her father were putting away shocking volumes of food and drink, and I thought perhaps this was normal for them, the way that André the Giant could drink forty beers with dinner. She had given him a pleading look when he ordered the fourth Tom Collins, but he had ignored her, as though he could not feel her eyes boring holes in the side of his face as he told me about a guy he had known in construction who had a pet chimp, and wasn’t that incredible? It used to wear little overalls.

Aside from that single warning look Bunny had given Ray, she appeared to be at ease with the situation, and Ray’s conversational alacrity had never ceased, so I was disoriented when he was visibly weaving as we made our way out to the parking lot for the car after dinner.

I looked at Bunny, who would not meet my eyes. Oughtn’t we not allow him to drive? Shouldn’t we suggest that we taxi home? But she was already casually getting into the car, as though everything were fine. I could not fathom a polite way to decline, and so I got in and buckled my seat belt nervously. Perhaps he would be somehow more able to drive a car in a straight line than he was able to walk in one.

“A funny story about Bunny’s grandpa,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out of our space, when suddenly the car lurched forward and we slammed into a pole. The force of the impact was surprising, considering that we had been at a stop. He must have had his foot slammed on the gas, and the car in drive instead of reverse. I was breathing hard and the backs of my hands were prickling with adrenaline.

Ray Lampert popped the car back into park, yanking on the gearshift. “Fucking bloody shit hell fuck motherfucker,” he said, and got out of the car to look at the front bumper. Bunny and I stayed in the backseat, and she turned to me and said, quite casually, “This is not the first time he’s done this,” and then laughed.

Outside the car, he was yelling and kicking the tire of the car repeatedly, but the noise was hushed by the expensive car, almost as though we were sealed in some kind of space pod. I could see the spittle fly out of his mouth, lit up by the streetlight. Mostly, I was confused. My entire childhood had been a training exercise in alcohol tolerance mathematics, and it didn’t seem to me possible that Ray Lampert could be this drunk from only four cocktails.

“Best to wait,” Bunny said. “Until he wears himself out.”

She reached over and held my hand again, and we watched her father kick the car some more. I had assumed the damage could not be much, considering that we couldn’t have been going very fast, but it seemed the bumper was more seriously dented than Ray Lampert wished it to be. Finally, as Bunny predicted, he seemed to tire out, and then he just sat on the hood of the car and stared up at the stars.

Finally, Bunny decreed him calm enough and opened her door and popped her head out. “Do you want to just cab?” she said, since this was before the days of Uber.

“What?” He swung his head toward her, surprised, and I realized he was in such a blind drunk that he had not remembered we were in the car. “Sure, sure, honey,” he said. “I’ll call you a cab.”

She got back in the car and we watched him as he did things on his phone, and when that seemed to be concluded, he lay down on the hood of the car, put his hands behind his head, his phone resting on his belly, and then fell asleep. Had he called a cab through some sort of web form? At first I was not sure he was asleep, except for the incredibly slow and steady rhythm of his stomach rising and falling, the phone balanced precariously on top of it. I kept expecting the phone to slide down and hit the windshield, but it did not.

“Do you think the cab will find us?” Bunny asked me. I had no idea. We waited for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time Bunny became visibly more anxious. She kept apologizing. “This is so embarrassing,” she would whisper as we watched her father sleeping on the hood of the car. “I can’t believe this is happening. I’m so sorry. I thought tonight would be fun.”

Finally, she felt she should at least check his cell phone, and so she carefully cracked her door open and crept around the car. But when she leaned over to snatch the phone off his belly, she was forced to put some of her weight on the crumpled bumper and it sheered right off the car with a tremendous clang, causing her to jump back and Ray Lampert to sit bolt upright, already yelling a kind of Viking war cry without words. He looked around frantically and saw Bunny with her hands up, cringing.

“What the hell were you doing?” he asked.

“I was trying to get your phone,” she said, pointing to his phone, which had fallen off his belly when he sat up and was now wedged against the windshield.

“Get your own fucking phone,” he said. “I’m going home.” And then he slid, awkwardly, off the hood of the car, grabbed his phone, and fumbled with the driver’s-side door. I scrambled to unbuckle myself and get out, and I went around to where Bunny stood by the lost bumper of the car and the lamppost we had hit.