driving through Delaware on a hot day in June with this friend of mine named Shelly, telling her all about this time when I was seven or eight. My parents, I'm saying, used to rent this house on the bay when I was a kid, out near Dewey or Bethany, maybe, not far from where we're driving. It was one of those A-frame things you see all over the place out here, one of those houses built ten feet off the ground on thick phone-pole stilts so it's protected from floods and hurricanes and what not. And the land all around the place, I'm telling her, was nothing but flat, flat dirt that seemed to go on for miles, with another A-frame house on stilts pretty much just like ours every fifty or hundred yards. The ground there was full of bee holes, and the bees would crawl out of the ground and fly away, leaving tiny clouds of dirt in the air behind them. I used to break up sticks and stuff them in the holes so the bees couldn't get out.
Anyway, I don't know why, but I'm spending a lot longer than I probably need to setting up this story for Shelly. I'm telling her all about this goddamn house, with its orange and green vinyl furniture like beach houses have, and its '50s-style refrigerator. I'm telling her about the fishing nets hung on the living room walls, and the fake plastic crabs and lobsters stuck in them. I'm telling her about the crankable glass slats on the storm doors, and the dresser that made my whole bedroom smell like cedar whenever you opened a drawer. I'm telling her about how the first thing my family always did when we got to town was go to the A&P up on the highway and buy all the groceries for the week, and how I used to try to get my mom to buy me a carton of Yoo-Hoo when my dad was off shopping in another aisle, and how we had to lug all the groceries up the sandy wooden stairs to the kitchen door, and how this was 1978 or so, so my favorite T-shirt had a picture of a Star Wars stormtrooper on it.
"Yeah yeah," Shelly finally says, "it was a beach house, you were at the beach. I get it. What's the story?" She's got her seatbelt off, and she's twisted around sideways in her seat, her back against the passenger door. There's a Rolling Rock from the cooler in the back seat in her hand, and there's a bright green cornfield streaking by behind her. She's grinning at me, looking hard at me. She's been looking at me all afternoon, and I'm starting to wonder what it's about.
"I'm getting there," I tell her.
I realize at this point that there are two key facts for my story that I haven't told her yet. The first is that my family didn't rent this entire house. The place was broken up into two
