ago. The building itself was all glass and brushed steel, the kind of showroom the manufacturer designed in Detroit and copied in a thousand towns, with a polished white floor you could see your face in and a coffee bar and a children's corner nobody's children ever used. But the thing people remembered about it, the thing that had gotten it written up in the regional paper when it opened, was the deck.
The deck ran along the whole south side of the building. It was raised about three feet off the ground, built of wide planks of dark ipe wood that had been sanded and