A young man named Adam remembers a day at the Connecticut beaches with his family, when he was a boy. His father and older brother Howard were helping horseshoe crabs that got stuck on their backs, calling Adam heartless when he exclaimed that they should just leave them alone. Adam remembers seeing male and female horseshoe crabs mate along the water as his father galloped around the beach.  Adam then thinks back to a day at the pediatrician’s, where he had to let the doctor shoot water in his ears to clean them of wax in order to show his brother that the procedure wasn’t scary. Knowing that he was supposed to put his brother at ease, Adam said that the water felt nice, and Howard is able to withstand the ear-cleaning procedure with no issues.  Another memory Ryan remembers is going to Woolworth’s, a discounted store, with Howard and their father. Their father loved buying things from this store and bought many items, such as a stopwatch, a string of Ivy League pennants, a screwdriver, and bananas. Ryan enjoyed this store too and would help his father find interesting things to buy whenever his mother wasn’t around to stop them. Howard, however, bought nothing, aside from occasional discounted cards for their mother.  During this time of their lives, their mother would tell Ryan to help Howard because Howard had difficulty understanding things—although Howard was older, the two boys were eventually in the same grade in junior high, as Howard failed two grades and Ryan skipped one. Ryan would try to protect his brother from bullies, but bullies were not afraid of Ryan because he was so short and Howard let them do whatever they want.  The boys’ doctor, Dr. Zorn, liked their mother quite a bit and proposed that Ryan may grow in the future. He also tried to encourage Howard to engage in physical activity but to no avail. Eventually, the boys’ mother divorced their father and married Dr. Zorn, and Howard could not forgive her. Ryan went to college in-state in order to be close to Howard, who dropped out of high school and went to a training school in the same town as Ryan. When the boys came home one summer, they found their mother very ill, reduced to a skeleton. She soon died, and at the funeral, Howard cried violently while holding his brother.