In California, a writer speculates on her five-year plan, how “in the first and second years, I will continue as I am,” and “[i]n the third year, I will make a change,” and how “[a]fter this change, years four and five will be glorious…full of business opportunities, artistic breakthroughs, romantic escapades, and copious drug use.” The writer considers how in her novel, there is a girl who, like her, works at a fish supply store. That girl’s store is impacted by an earthquake, which causes her to realize “she needs to be far, far away from where she is now,” a realization that prompts her to leave. The writer doesn’t mind working at the fish store. She gets high with her boyfriend before their shifts.  Her boyfriend thinks she should write about her father, a man who “wears a bathrobe all day” and “hoards things” and “continually plants and uproots his garden.” Her boyfriend “thinks [her current] novel might actually be about [her] father.” This causes the writer to think about him, how she has taken to lying to him lately, saying she’s getting married, that she’s getting a raise, that she’s getting published. The first lie was when she was a kid – she poured cough syrup into her father’s fish tank because he loved his fish so much (more, maybe, than her). Now, she lies to him about having a book deal. She asks how his book is coming along. He says he’d love for her to read it. She tells her boyfriend about her father, how he was “not that bad of a man. Not really. He yelled at me, as all fathers do. He hit me, as many fathers do,” and her boyfriend “says he cannot be a receptacle for [her] unresolved childhood trauma, but what he can do is write with [her]. [She] can write [her] novel. He can write his poems.” She takes her father to the fish store. They run into her boyfriend. She pretends not to know him because she’s lied, said her boyfriend was someone else—a professor, not someone who worked at a fish store. He plays along, pretends not to know her either, but eventually asks, “Why are you doing this?” and says, “I think you should leave now…You can’t do things like this. Not here.” She’s worried about a frog who keeps jumping and landing on his back. She thinks, “I want to help him, but I don’t want to touch him.” When she doesn’t leave, her boyfriend feeds the frog to a carnivorous fish. Her father buys the fish who ate the frog. Later, the writer reads her father’s novel, which is about her, their relationship. The man in her father’s novel makes a five-year plan, and at the end of it, he will be reunited to his daughter, “be enough on his own.”