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your
    own good. Note that this is often what parents say when it is also
    for our own good. I can’t work with a human weather system in
    the next room.”
    “There’s miles of beach,” I tried.
    “Forget it.”
    “Did you see how big that town was? What are the chances of
    even finding a job?”
    “Zero, if we don’t look. You’re not the depressed type, C. P.
    When have you ever been the depressed type? We Oateses are
    sturdy folks. There is an after you have to plan for, here. Bus is
    leaving, ten minutes.” He shoved his chair back and stood. For
    a minute I thought he might pound his chest like an alpha male
    gorilla. It was puffed out like that, anyway. “God, the ocean is
    energizing,” he said.
    The library was the first stop, as it always was when my father was
    in a new place. He visited libraries like other people did museums
    or historic churches. The Bishop Rock Library was so tiny, it could
    have fit into the children’s room of the Seattle branch. He bullshit-
    ted with the librarian who followed him out with her eyes, I noticed.
    I told you, women looked at him like that. He checked out a large,
    hefty book on the history of revolvers (that thing weighed fifteen
    pounds, I swear) as well as several novels, and I did the same.
    “She said to check the taffy shop for jobs,” my father said
    when we emerged and found ourselves back on the main street.
    * 31 *
    Deb Caletti
    “Did you know Bishop Rock taffy is world renowned?” He
    smirked with a bit of superiority, but I could tell he liked this
    small town. We walked down the sidewalk, past a tiny grocery and
    a store selling souvenir T-shirts, and finally arrived at the candy
    shop, which had a yellow striped awning and a sweet, buttery
    smell oozing like sugar lava from the doorway. Dad stopped, but
    only for a second. “Come on,” he said, and we walked past that
    place. It was one of the good things about him—my father under-
    stood the fine shadings of feeling, the sense you had in your gut
    but didn’t have words for. The yellow awning and the bins of
    sunny pastels and the matching yellow aprons and the optimism
    of taffy were impossibly surreal and strange against the backdrop
    of what had happened—think pop music in a funeral home, or
    a brand new baby dressed all in black. I could never work there,
    not then. Cheer and despair don’t like to sit that close together.
    Across the street there was a small marina, a dock of parked
    fishing boats and a small, dilapidated tug. There was a second dock
    filled with sailboats and cruisers and motorboats. A huge sailboat
    was moored at the very end, with a mast straight to the sky, and
    you could see a guy on the deck, shading his eyes to look at another
    guy, who was hanging way up in a harness on that mast.
    “Look,” my father said.
    “Beautiful,” I said.
    “Let’s go see it.”
    “Dad . . .” I hated when he did this. He wasn’t just going to
    go see it—he would talk to those guys. He had to talk to people.
    All people, anywhere, people in movie lines and airports, chefs
    and taxi drivers. He learned things, great, but it always felt a bit
    * 32 *
    Stay
    embarrassing. Did they even want to tell him their life stories, or
    how a propeller worked, or how many miles they guessed they’d
    driven that taxi over the years? “I’ve got to find a job, remember?”
    I said. But he had already tossed our bag of books in the car and
    was crossing the street, heading toward the marina and that gor-
    geous sailboat.
    I followed him. I could feel the dock moving under my feet.
    The water sloshed below, and you could smell its salty green depths
    and the deadness of seaweed washed ashore. There was a small hut
    at the end of the dock, a ticket booth. The boat was a tour boat. A
    majestic blue hull, with the name in script on the side. Obsession .
    “ Obsession , eh?” my father shouted to the guy on deck.
    The guy turned. I was surprised to see he was not much older
    than me.