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Show us to peel wet tissue for days. We brushed our teeth while moving, went to the bathroom while moving, slept while moving, and ate while moving. My father believed in making good time. To that end, we drove all night most nights. Sometimes, toward the morning when all of us, except my youngest brother, had taken a turn at the wheel and none of us could remain awake any longer, my dad would pull into a Chamber of Commerce parking lot, or a rest stop, or the side of the road and the Winnie would stop. For those short hours, the only movement was the breathing of my family, five bodies within spitting distance of one another, trying to drift away. The office is larger than most, practical rather than elegant, with a window that overlooks the parking lot to CINPAC Fleet and captures the sky in its narrow length. Most of the furniture in the room is metal: army green filing cabinets, a gray metal typing stand weighted down with reams of once-white paper, a thin gray coat rack which, in the tropics, never sees a coat and holds in the crook of its arm, instead, the Christmas lights from last year's office party. Plaques that line the wall like stepping stones trace his career, flat brown awards shaped into shields, stars, a fleur de lis. The Chief Petty Officer who does his typing for him is competent and for that fact alone he can't complain. He has never understood people who cannot do their jobs and has no tolerance for a slow mind. In his first line of work, farming, dim wits resulted in the auger ingesting your arm. For every friend of his father's who had ten digits, two more went ringless, burying the signs of their momentary lapse of judgment behind the bib on their overalls. Quickness, deftness, a kind of mental and physical dexterity that saved no room for 197 |