“Well,” she said, handing him a wet rag for his face, “that’s one way to get rid of mosquitoes.”

Max, of course, had a “better” method. He produced a collapsible fishing rod with a spinning reel, a tackle box full of lures he couldn’t name, and a fish finder device that beeped loudly every three seconds. He spent forty minutes trying to cast without tangling his line. When he finally got it in the water, he caught a submerged log, then a water lily, then, miraculously, a tiny sunfish—which he then tried to “fix” by reviving it in a bucket of creek water for twenty minutes before my mom gently pointed out the fish had been dead for ten.

My mom glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Her look said: This is your friend. You chose this. I wanted to dissolve into the upholstery.