My mother so often said to Spike, when he was not dead, "We should have named you," whichever sweet or sour name of the hour, that we have adherently extended Watson's name to a length I cannot recite.
        The afternoon was governed by whim. Consequently, we rode over the rivers, past the wood, and through the mountains to our grandparents' foreign home. It was two in the morning when we arrived - roughly seven hours past their bedtime - and we were no less awake. I gave my grandmother a mug from the Bronx Zoo, and my grandfather an old piece of jewelry on which an emblematic H had been engraved. Frazzled and markedly pleased, they left to share their bed during a time that my grandfather goes straight into a sound sleep, and my grandmother reads by flashlight for hours. As they did, Lake and I sat huddled together on a patchwork settee and shared a brownie she first tested for peanut butter. We spent two hours looking through an "I Spy" book and never found the duck. I dressed into my grandmother's nightgown and we tip-toed quietly, past the door with a covered hole induced by the punch of my then teenage uncle, into the deep, dark room redolent of the trees it is so close beside. Watson plopped by the crooked door, his nose aligned with the only exposed sliver of light. My mobile phone never seems to have more than one bar of service when visiting my grandparents, so I fruitlessly leaned toward the window, and whispered my good nights to Tim. In the hardship of being kept awake against your will, there is only one delightful exception, and that is being kept awake because your little sister will not stop laughing.