Michael Sheehy used to wear an eye patch. When he started at Perkin’s candy store, he traded in the patch for a story. He told everyone his sight had been damaged in combat—a near death match with a German soldier on the outskirts of Marseilles. He repeated the story often, whenever he felt he was in jeopardy of losing his job or whenever he saw a customer glancing at the roving eye.

In fact, Michael Sheehy had never been to war. He was disqualified for poor sight and flatfeet. Still the young high school girls working at Perkin’s candy store found the eye both repulsive and romantic. They became nervous under its gaze and would shiver in excitement and fear when the man placed a warm hand on their shoulders or against the small of their backs.

When Mr. Perkin slammed the door to his office, Michael felt something inside him pick up and turn sour. He looked over at the girls in the window with their hairnets. They were twisting, turning the taffy into a spiral of sugar and smiling sweetly at the crowd gathered to watch them. They were very clean and very pretty.

Michael cast his good eye on Emeline Dougherty, head taffy puller at Perkin’s Candy. Her cheeks were flushed, her long brown hair was pulled back in a net, and her arms moved smooth as a machine.

Michael slid open the back door of the counter and picked a piece of peanut butter taffy. He held it in his hand until he could feel the candy begin to soften and lose its shape. Then he peeled off the wax paper, took aim, and threw it across the store at Emeline.

The taffy hit Emeline in the back of her head. She cried out and a shiny loop slipped and drooped from the pull. Emeline and her partner frantically tried to twist and jerk the goo back to the proper stiffness, but it was too late—the taffy was lost— a soft puddle of maple walnut on the floor.

Emeline Dougherty was not a girl who made mistakes. When she was a child, her father had been tragically killed— smothered accidentally on a Sunday promenade by a mound of bluefin tuna. A faulty crane unloading nets from a fishing boat had snapped on the docks and buried him. For this reason Emeline harbored a substantial fear of the unexpected. Her life became a plan that, with the help of her mother, Emeline mapped out at an early age. In her mind, she saw her future in degrees of longitude and latitude, with projections of normal faults, reverse faults, and anticlinal axes. Her position at Perkin’s Candy as head taffy puller was an important contour on her topographic existence: three years of salary to be saved for school to become a dental hygienist. As Emeline watched the candy slip from her fingers, she felt a familiar panic of loss.