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electric.”
    “He lets you play it?” she asked.
    “Not when he’s around.” Phelps smiled so broadly Angie laughed.
    “Help yourselves to the food,” she told us, “before the old folks gobble it all up.”
    I saw a crowd in sun hats, flowered dresses and slacks the color of Easter eggs. “I don’t think we’re dressed right.”
    She glanced at our mud-splattered shorts. “You’re perfect. It’s summertime.” She went back to rubbing Lizzy until the dog’s foot twitched like an outboard engine about to turn over.
    We strolled off, and when I looked back I caught Angie crying, which reminded me of what my mother had called her a month earlier when Angie waded bare-legged in front of our house. I was the only one who could see her tears, but before I could point them out my mother asked my father if he didn’t have anything better to do than ogle that crazy dundula . It was a word my Croatian grandmother passed down. I didn’t ask what it meant and I didn’t say anything to anyone a week later when I saw Angie pacing the crown of the Stegner roof, which was so steep slipping meant dying.
    I led Phelps toward the long white food table where people huddled around Judge Norman Stegner as if he were passing out money.
    “It’s my oyster man!” he announced once he spotted me.
    Gray heads spun—I heard gristle pop in some old neck—their eyes flailing above mine, then dropping to find me. Oyster man? The judge is such a kidder.
    I recognized one of them from the newspaper or television as the judge thrust his clean, strong hand at me.
    There was nothing imposing about Judge Stegner other than his voice. He was chinless and bird-chested with dull forgettable eyes and thin, seagull-white hair, but his voice made everyone else’s sound like a squeaky clarinet they were still learning how to play. I looked for Phelps, but he’d already abandoned me for food. The judge introduced me by my full name—just in case there were any Irish genealogy buffs in the mix—and explained that I oversaw the very oyster farm from which they were feasting.
    They hummed on cue, but that was just the setup for wherever he was headed. The judge was like that. He never rushed, but he was always going somewhere. “This is the young man who found the giant squid. Tell them, Miles.”
    I pointed to where it beached. “I heard it,” I said softly, “and went to see what it was.”
    “ Speak up , Miles,” the judge boomed. “Just talk about it.”
    There was no quick way out. I widened my stance in the grass. “Well, I expected to find a sick whale or sea lion or something else stuck high on the mud.”
    One of the ladies blurted out that she’d seen me on television. It killed me to watch a deviled egg go in and out of her tiny mouth while she shared that.
    “It’s not as if things don’t get stranded down here,” I continued. “A minke and even a gray whale got confused once. The tide leaves pretty fast and goes all the way out. And to tell you the truth, I still wasn’t sure what it was when I got as close as I was willing to get, but then I saw the long tentacles with those big suckers and then that huge eye and I knew.”
    Goose bumps covered me—some stories tighten their hold on me the more I tell them—and the grown-ups leaned in, just in case this was all building to something remarkable they could share with their most interesting friends. I watched them clean their teeth with their tongues, their eyes on me as if I were an exotic discovery myself. A lady with a heavy gold necklace winced as though the subject burned her belly, but the judge beamed as if I were riding a unicycle. “You’re looking at the next Jacques Cousteau.” It sounded as irrefutable as any court order, and everyone marveled at the notion. Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become than what you are.
    “How big was the eye?” inquired a tall, crooked man, guiding a cracker between yellow teeth.
    “As big as your