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dad and their dog, all giants too. There was a town nearby but it was small, or that was what Philip kept calling it. Littleton, he called it, even though it was really called Fenlan.
    Viewed from a certain angle, however, it too was giant-sized.
    Ann had turned ten only a month before they came there. She wouldn’t remember much about that house for long because it was very boring. There was a little yard with a plastic slide in it. She had a little room in the back with a window too high up for her to see out of without climbing on the top bunk. Her dad hated the kitchen. Her mom hated the basement. She hated that window.
    As far as Ann knew, Philip didn’t hate anything. Not there, anyway.
    Ann would remember the house at the lake for a long time—first, because she watched it being made. Her dad was a structural engineer and when she was little he started his own company. He was good at it and soon he was making buckets of money. The first bucket went to buying the old lot on the lake. The second bucket, to buying a beautiful sailboat to tie up there. The third, to figuring out the best house for them. The money they got from selling that other house went to building it.
    It was built of cedar logs, mostly, with some concrete and stone around the foundation and slate for the roof. That summer, the summer they went there, it wasn’t finished yet. The foundation was in and the walls were up, but it was a hollow box: a maze of two-by-fours and plastic sheets, conduits and copper pipes all exposed—open holes where windows would go. So they couldn’t live in it. But the last place there had had a nice dock and a boathouse next to it, and that was where they stayed, while the crew their dad had hired finished the job.
    Philip thought the boathouse was worse than the old house. It was small, shaped like a shoebox, and it was damp, and in the night the water from the lake lapped under the floorboards.
    “I think it’s nice,” said Ann as they lay on the air mattresses at the far end of the little boathouse from their parents, and Philip said, “It makes me want to pee.”
    “So pee,” she said.
    “You first.” Philip knew the one thing that Ann didn’t like about this place was the facilities, as her dad called them: an orange outdoor toilet that got emptied weekly and smelled . . . well, of pee, of course.
    “You don’t need to go there,” she said. “You can just go outside.”
    “I can go right here,” he said, and Ann rolled over and gave him a kick.
    “I would,” he said. “I’d pee all over you.”
    “Gross.”
    “Yeah. It would be gross,” he said, slowly so as to emphasize each word.
    “Quiet time,” said her mom from behind the sheets they’d hung at the far end of the boathouse, for privacy. She was there alone with them that night; their dad, down in the city taking care of a contract with some condo dwellers. Philip pulled his headphones over his ears and changed CDs in the blue Discman he’d brought with him. He rolled over and opened the book he was reading. It was an old spy book by Len Deighton.
Yesterday’s Spy
. There was a picture of a rusted automatic pistol on it. Ann wanted to read it next.
    When he turned the page, Ann got up and tiptoed over to the window. It was an old-fashioned wood-frame with nine panes. The glass rippled like tree gum. Outside, night settled over the lake, but she couldn’t see it, for the reflection of Philip’s reading light.
    She squinted, and put her thumb on the lower left pane, and traced the crack there. When they’d arrived, it had only been as long as her middle finger. Now, it was long as her hand, heel to fingertip.
    She didn’t care what Philip said: even though it was small, and temporary—and it smelled like lake, and she didn’t yet have her own space—she liked this little boathouse better than the old house. The window was just her size. And as far as the lapping water went: it was nice.
    It sounded like home.
    They had a