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the money from my father’s life insurance to buy our cabin in the woods. The cabin is shaped like a triangle; apparentlyit’s part of some sort of ancient worldwide tradition to let your rooftop trail all the way down to the grass. The almighty A-frame! There’s moss and ivy creeping up the roof from the ground, and sometimes it gets mildewy in the peak of the house, where my bedroom makes up the top floor, and it starts to smell a little like pond scum and cedar. Downstairs, there’s Mom’s bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom, all paneled in dark wood that Mom calls “too seventies to abide.” Maybe that’s why she hangs tapestries and quilts and paintings on every surface. There’s a porch in the back, and one in the front with an awning that doesn’t really offer enough shade in the summertime.
    The cabin is on the outskirts of Rochdale, Michigan, hours away from where Auburn-Stache lives. My whole life long, he’s come to check up on me at least twice a month. He’s a kook, but I suppose I love him or something.
    Anyhow, one of my weirdest memories begins with one of those checkups.
    I’ve never seen Dr. Auburn-Stache drive. He’s too careful about my allergies. So he parks the brown smudge of his latest Impala at the end of the two-mile-long driveway. (That’s some nonsense number of kilometers. I’m just saying that our driveway is more like a long, thin dirt road.) Then he buzzes and flits to the house with a suitcase in hand. He doesn’t wear a lab coat, which is kind of disappointing. He wears paisley dress shirts and corduroy pants. For a long time I thought this was how men dressed, but Mom smirks and says Auburn-Stache is “quirky.”
    Usually I get a standard physical check from him, but he has to be creative about some things. For years I’ve had this sort of awkward, deflated Mohawk haircut. Not by choice. By the hand of Auburn-Stache! Whenever he gives me a physical, he has to lookinto my ears and nose and mouth without a penlight. (You remember how penlights and I don’t get along.)
    So he has this wacky old apparatus that’s like a small adjustable gas lantern with a pane of magnifying glass in front of it, and a funnel attached to that. He holds that against the side of my head whenever he wants to check my ears for infections. (It’s his makeshift otoscope.) He says having hair on the sides of my head is a fire hazard, but I think he just likes to make me look like a rooster.
    He used to sit me on his knee out on the front porch, where the light is better. One time when I was pretty little, Dr. Auburn-Stache pressed his otoscope against the side of my head and I didn’t feel like sitting still anymore. So I wriggled away and somehow knocked the otoscope onto the wooden porch, and the lantern shattered. There was a sudden burst of heat as the doormat went up in flames, and then the nearest potted plant, and then the wreath on the open door, and then the carpet in the breezeway. I remember feeling like the fire had a mind of its own, sort of like electricity—like it was out to get me.
    Good thing Dr. Auburn-Stache is always so twitchy, because he bundled me up and flitted and buzzed away from the porch. He deposited me on a stump pretty far away from the cabin and told me to “Stay!” like I was the drooling puppy you compared me to.
    I think he was going back to rescue Mom, who’d been inside making tea. She needed no rescuing. She strode right out through the fiery doorway and onto the porch with Dorian Gray pinched under her arm, both of them looking more annoyed than anything else. He was clawing her up pretty good. Out on the lawn, she thrust the cat into Auburn-Stache’s arms before sprinting to the garage to call the fire department.
    I sat there on the stump, just blinking, watching the flames lick the brick chimney. The roof was catching fire by the time we heard