Don’t ask me why. Until he insisted on exploring the house bottom to top, I’d probably been up there twice in the whole time I lived in Coral River: once, to unload the dump of stuff my dad saddled me with after he died; and once to check for a dead animal after the whole house went rank with a bad smell. (It was a raccoon and I found it after two days of searching, in the old laundry chute; it had crawled halfway up the wall before getting stuck. The plumber had to draw it out with one of those steel wires they use for breaking up matted hair in the drain.) If you’d asked me—if you asked me, still—I would have said attics are like the spleen of a house. Ignored, forgotten, useless. But six months after Martin and I first shared that watermelon, we went exploring. It had been snowing for days—that was a bad winter. Even in the ten seconds he stood inside the door, stamping ice from his boots and shaking it from his beard, a half inch of snow gathered on the kitchen floor and afterward melted all over the linoleum.
