Eventually I stopped asking about leaving, just let him tell me what to do, as though he still thinks I’m a kid he has to save from the incoming tide. This is how you collect drinking water from the rain. This is how to boil seawater to get salt. This is how you make the wood burn slower. This is how you sail, even though the sailboat he built has been sitting in our barn, abandoned and useless, for years. Sometimes I’ll go out there when Dad’s asleep, sit on the deck as it rocks on the tide. That sailboat was supposed to be our escape when the waters reached our doorstep—big enough for our whole family—but then Mom left, and the waters only came as far as the barn, and I was abandoned here, gutting fish and scaling them off our porch in the rain, wondering if this is what the rest of my life will look like.

“What is that?” I ask when I bring the shelled conchs inside. Dad doesn’t answer, just pulls the lamp closer to the machine, works at a stuck screw, the sound of rain crashing in waves against the house.

“Come hold the bottom,” he says. And when I do, he lifts the top out like pulling meat from a lobster. There’s a whole mess of corroded wires hanging from the piece he’s holding, their ends dripping seawater into the case. “Go ahead and dump that water outside.”

I cross the room, the salt water sloshing in the container, and bend down to put it on the floor before opening the front door. The rain splatters my arms with cold when I open it, and Dad finally answers my question.

“It’s called a turntable—plays music,” he says. “Your mom and I used to like listening to records.” I don’t move, afraid if I dump the water he’ll stop talking, but maybe if I keep the door open to the wind and the rain he’ll say more about what she was like, where she might be, if he thinks she misses me.

“What kind of music did she like?”

“Shut the door,” he says. “You’re letting the rain in.” And though I want him to keep talking about Mom, he doesn’t, just places the machine back in the case when I bring it to him and gently pries off the center ring at the middle of the disc to reveal another set of screws.

“Funny how you forget names,” he finally says. “Lightning Hopkins, Nina Simone, James Brown, Mississippi John Hurt…” He places a screw in a small dish and starts in on the next one. “Like they’re all lined up, waiting for you.”