On second thought, maybe it wasn’t the same place. The sign, OFFSHORE COTTAGES, WEEKLY/MONTHLY RENTALS, didn’t ring any bells, and in the center of the horseshoe, where the playground had been, there was now an in-ground pool enclosed by a chain-link fence. Beyond this were a shuffleboard court and several stone barbecue pits topped with heavy metal grates. But after more than four decades wouldn’t it have been even stranger if there weren’t significant changes? More difficult to reconcile was his memory of being able to walk to the beach that summer, which had to be a good half mile away. Had he conflated elements of the Browning summer with other vacations? Perhaps he’d added the detail of walking to the beach when he wrote about it as an adult, and it had been assimilated as memory.

About half the cottages looked occupied. Otherwise identical, each was painted a different pastel color and named-Sea Breeze, High Tide, Quarter Deck, Scallop Shell. Did he actually remember his parents making fun of the kitschy names, or was this just something they would’ve done? It was still only seven-thirty, too early to call his mother and ask. Besides, even after talking to her, he still wouldn’t know.

If these were the same cottages, then Dunwanderin would have been theirs-two-thirds of the way up the right-hand side of the horseshoe. It faced diagonally across the pool patio toward what would have been the Browning cottage. Feeling his sleepless exhaustion drag him down, Griffin put the car in park and closed his eyes, allowing himself to become again a twelve-year-old boy in the backseat of his parents’ car. The memory of their arrival here that first day was suddenly there, more vivid and detailed than ever before-his mother and father just staring at the cottage, neither making any move to get out. What they were doing, he knew from experience, was comparing the actual cottage with the description of it they’d been sent last January by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, the brochure’s charming becoming tiny; rustic becoming dingy; fully equipped becoming attic furnished. In other words, crappy.

“Good,” said his father finally, his voice full of false cheer, “there’s a deck.”

“That?” said his mother, pointing. The warped, splintered boards weren’t even bordered by railings, and tall, spiky black weeds were sticking up between the planks. “You call that a deck?”

“Hey, there’s a table and four chairs, right? Perfect for us. You, me, Jackeroo and Al.” Clearly, he’d come to a decision, and he meant to make the best of the situation. It had been a long drive from the Mid-fucking-west, and Griffin ’s mother had been angry the whole way, failing to cheer up even when they crossed the Sagamore and his father had bravely broken into “That Old Cape Magic.” The New York State Thruway motel where they’d stayed the night before had been crappy, and this was going to be crappier still.

A screen door banged on the other side of the compound, and a little girl, shrieking with delight, came running toward them, her brother at her heels. They both stopped near the swing set, heads cocked, taking the measure of the newcomers. (At the wheel of his convertible, some forty-five years in the future, Griffin could feel himself smile at the sight of them.)

“Wonderful,” his mother said, no doubt envisioning an army of bratty kids, every cottage swarming with them. “Just great.”

“Mary, it’ll be fine,” Griffin ’s father said. “Next year we’ll do better. They never freeze salaries two years in a row.”

“I like it,” Griffin piped up from the backseat, sensing his father needed an ally. There was a tiny window under the eaves on the cottage’s second floor, and he’d intuited correctly that this room would be his.

His mother stared straight ahead, incredulous. “We’re paying how much?”

“It’ll be fine,” his father repeated, “unless you prefer to be miserable.”

“It’s like an oven up here,” she remarked when they shouldered open the door to the tiny room under the eaves. Not much bigger than a closet, it was only about five feet in height from floor to peak. His father, no giant, had to duck when he entered. “This is the kids’ room, all right,” he said when Griffin ’s mother, shaking her head in disgust, went back downstairs. Three cots with thin, stained mattresses crowded the room, two along opposite walls, the third folded up behind the door. His father threw open the tiny window, and together he and Griffin repositioned one of the cots directly beneath it to catch any stray breezes. At the base of one wall, where the A formed by the roof was at its widest point, were built-in storage compartments.

“Wanna bet that’s where they keep the games?” his father said, pulling on the stuck door. His parents never brought games of their own on vacation, preferring to see what each new rental provided, though they were usually very old board games with pieces missing, unplayable. When the door didn’t budge, he yanked it harder. This time it opened and his father yelped, pulling his hand back fast, as if from a fire, and then made the mistake of straightening up, the crown of his head smacking the low roof beam. “Ow!” he said, rubbing it with both hands. Whenever he injured himself, he looked betrayed, as if somebody else, maybe Griffin, was responsible. He complained of having what he termed a “low threshold of physical discomfort,” what Griffin ’s mother termed “being a big baby.” He came over now, bending low so Griffin could examine his scalp. “Is the skin broken?”

“Sort of,” Griffin said. An impressive knot was rising where his father’s hair was thinnest. The skin was abraded, a dozen tiny spots of blood just starting to form.

“Bleeding?”

“Just a little.”

Now his father was examining his injured thumb, where a dark splinter had been driven under the skin. “This vacation isn’t starting very well, is it?”

Griffin admitted it wasn’t.

“Your mother…,” he began, but broke off in order to chew at the splinter.

Griffin waited.

“Damn,” he said, showing Griffin this wound, too. “It’s in there.” The thick end of the splinter was close to the surface, the slender end, a mere shadow, much deeper.

“What about Mom?”

“Right now she’s on the warpath, but she’ll calm down.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Griffin. “She just needs…” He let his voice trail off again, as if to admit that he had no idea, really, what his wife needed, then went back to gnawing on his thumb.

They could hear her opening and closing kitchen cabinets downstairs. “No wineglasses,” she muttered. “Not a single goddamn wineglass.” Then, calling up: “Bill! You’re not going to believe this.”

“Gotta go,” his father said, grinning sheepishly, and headed downstairs.

There was no chest of drawers in the room, so Griffin laid out his week’s worth of vacation clothes on the extra cot and shoved his suitcase under it. When he thought he heard scurrying in the shadows of the storage cabinet, he quickly shut the door with his foot. Kneeling on the bed, he peered outside. Even with the window open, the room was still stifling hot, with barely enough breeze to flutter the curtain. On the sill a big green fly, dazed, was buzzing around on its back. It had been trapped between the window and the screen, but now, with the window up, its freedom was at hand. Its mind, though, if it had one, hadn’t adjusted, the old hopeless reality holding sway. Griffin watched the stupid thing spin and buzz until he heard a door open below and his mother emerged onto the deck, where she just stood with her arms crossed. When his father appeared a moment later, Griffin had a good view of the top of his head, where the tiny spots of blood had connected in a purple blob.

“Look,” he said, bending down to show her.

“Good,” she said.

“This, too.” He was showing her the splinter now, and she winced-something about this smaller thumb injury apparently touched her in a way the larger one hadn’t.