A collection of magnifying glasses hung on the wall behind him. They made Mrs. Perkin remember an experiment she had done in embryology: fertilized eggs in different stages of incubation, cracked in a petri dish and studied under the scope. She’d seen mitosis, meiosis, and the development of the body— the bulb of a head, the curve of a spine, two dots appearing as eyes. When the students were finished, they dumped all the samples together in a bucket. Mrs. Perkin had held her broken egg, peered into the enormous mass of yellow, and paused. There were tiny bits of red spotting the yolks where the hearts of the birds were still beating. Later, when she told Mr. Perkin about it, he’d smiled and said, “Mmm. Scrambled eggs.”

Mrs. Perkin looked over at the cases of frames on the counter. There were dozens of sizes and shapes—square, round, and oval, silver and gold. “Maybe I need glasses,” she said.

“Would you like me to examine you?”

“No. I just want the frames.” She picked a silver pair with a thin pattern of vines engraved across the bridge and down the length of the arms. Mrs. Perkin put them on and looked in the mirror. She saw a woman older than she was.

In the bathroom, Emeline tried to remove the taffy from her hair. The high school girls gave words of comfort, but Emeline shunned their offers of grease, soap, and tonic water. She could feel anger prickling along her skin, spreading with exasperation. She broke from the crowd, grabbed her coat from the closet, and left without saying good-bye.

When Emeline was a little girl, her father warned her about emotions. Her mother had always been prone to hysterics, which frequently drove her father out of the house to take long walks along the wharf. He often brought Emeline with him. The two would move along in silence, Emeline taking three steps for every one of her father’s, doing her best to keep a look of preoccupation on her brow so that he would not feel the need to amuse her.

On their way back home, Emeline’s father would inevitably pause and voice some conclusion he’d arrived at during their stroll. Sometimes they were about his wife, sometimes they were about himself, and sometimes they were for Emeline: “Don’t be like your mother,” he said. “Stay away from the feelies.”

Emeline considered this as she walked down Main Street with taffy in her hair. She thought of her father’s final moments under the mound of bluefin tuna. She imagined the weight, the cold, wet slickness, the slowing beats of tails searching for water. She wondered if he’d been angry under the pile or if he’d had time to feel anything at all.