We moved up into the trees when the neighborhood flooded that April?blue plastic tarps slung up with belts and ropes, splintered plywood floors, dinghies or canoes bumping up against the tree trunks. Makeshift hammocks hung from the branches, swaying in the breeze. The water was the color of peanut butter. It roiled below our branches, churning up a soup of all the things we'd lost: spatu las, dolls, romance novels, Tupperware, spools of colored thread, porn magazines, textbooks, bicycle tires, empty picture frames. Once a miraculously airtight bag of mini-marshmallows, which my younger brothers fished out and gave to our mother, six months pregnant with her fourth child and hungry in every way. My mother spoke to the neighborhood physician often, describing her latest cravings or a cramp in her lower back. Dr. Adair was not actually a physician at all, but a professor of linguistics at the local community college, new to the neighborhood just that March, not long before the rain started up. His neighbors promptly appointed him physician when the local doctors' offices were swept away with everything else, and he took to his new role with stoicism and an endless reserve of ambiguous homeopathic remedies. Because he was a single parent, and good-looking, Dr. Adair was a rich source of gossip. He was also slightly darker-skinned, a smooth shade of caramel, and although American-born he was considered by most to be foreign, to be exotic. It was rumored that he had moved south from Boston not long after his wife?beautiful, we were sure?left him for another man. It was rumored he had lived in South Africa as a boy and discovered a new species of beetle, and also that he was a huge snob. His freshly painted house washed away with the rest of the neighborhood, and Dr. Adair now lived with his son, Peter, in the ancient oak that had marked the edge of their property line. Shortly after our new living arrangements were made, my mother rigged the first neighborhood telephone: two empty soup cans linked from tree to tree with a long, yellow string. Dr. Adair was on the other end.