My father came to Willow Creek an old man, and he came wanting to achieve three things: he wanted to become a father, he wanted to find love, and he wanted to start a successful business.

In his youth, back in his home town, he still had the same goals. He started a successful business with a lifelong friend and for the first few years the growth was phenomenal. Unfortunately, his business partner turned out to have a small gambling addiction, one which ignited a decade long battle to keep the company financially afloat. A battle which left my father hostile and his partner resentful.

Eventually, the business began succeeding again, and the partner’s problem started to recede, but his resentment stayed, and eventually my father saw himself ousted from his own company.

Willow Creek was a new start. A healthy (if late) start. A quaint start financed by what money he had left from the old days.

My father’s name was Brixton Forshale, and from that he named his store ‘Forshale Falls’. The name was meaningless – there were no major bodies of water nearby, and certainly none named after himself. He just thought that alliteration, surnames, and waterfalls were an appealing combination, and I certainly don’t disagree with it’s success.

The store started out selling only one product: plastic cats. They were cheap, and they were pointless; ultimately, they were toys. However, my father saw potential in them – potential to sell them as simple and tactile ornaments for the modern era.

It would never work today, but somehow it did back then. Folks passing by the empty field my Father called a store couldn’t help but be intrigued by the simplicity of it, and soon the store started to garner a surprising amount of regular customers.

The business had begun. Perfectly.

My father worked tirelessly to keep up the store’s momentum. Most nights he slept on a used red couch he had dragged into the store, always maintaining the pretense that the store was still open.

He ate little, mostly whatever scraps he had left preserved in his portable cooler.

And eventually, he managed to build a little shack-like bathroom facility onto the lot. There he both sold baths and toilets and openly used baths and toilets – while once again always maintaining the premise that the store was open almost 24 hours a day.

Of course, his mind wasn’t always on the store. After the complex failure that was his previous business venture, my father knew now not to wait for financial security before searching for other forms of happiness in life.

My father always told me that he had only ever had one romantic fling while living in Willow Creek, one with a woman whose name I don’t know and whose face I’d never recognize – one which simply faded out due to incompatibility.

However, I’m not an idiot – I know that he certainly had one much-stronger love after her.

Rae. She once told me in an uncharacteristically open conversation that she had never even so much as kissed my father, and surprisingly I believe her. Due to circumstances, they wouldn’t even have considered becoming romantically involved, but in my hindsight it’s clear as day that he loved her, whether unrequited or platonic, he loved her, and their continued friendship meant a whole lot to him.

As time moved on, he realized that he would never find someone to settle down with, that he would never fall in love. It must have crushed him, but I’m glad of it, because in that existential sadness he did the greatest thing he ever did for me:

He adopted me.

Peppino Forshale, aka Pep: that is who I am.

I do not remember much about life before being adopted, except for a few brief images of unfamiliar faces and long-abandoned rooms, but I certainly remember the few that immediately followed – my best years with my father.

Sure, he was awkward: built for a world far more pompous and easy than the one he ended up in. He had no charisma, little warmth, and no fatherly skills – but he was still my god damned dad and I god damn loved him.

He almost abandoned Forshale Falls in those first few years looking after me, but eventually, as I grew older, he realized that he had to find a way to keep the store going and growing somehow, else we be stranded together on some derelict roadside somewhere, penniless and all that.

He had two ideas to help salvage his business: one good and one bad.

The good idea was to start selling televisions. Cheap ones. Within months they become his primary product – and while they were his most expensive product to purchase, they were also naturally the most expensive to sell, leading to him finally earning some real money.

The bad idea was to hire an actual employee to run the store with/for him. This employee (pictured above) was named Eva… I think? He never really mentioned her much. In theory, she would run the shop for him while he looked after me and occasionally looked over things, but it didn’t work out well. To put it simply, he overworked her with insane hours and she irritated him with a seeming ‘half-hearted’ work ethic.

After several months, she was fired, and both remained aggressive towards the other for years after.

Ultimately, the biggest change to Forshale Falls ended up being Rae.

She needed money so she started working for dad, actually accepting the insane hours and poor working conditions, unlike Eva.

She needed a place to stay, so she started living at ours. That meant that she could look out for me as I grew up and became more independent. It also meant that my father could practically live at his store from that point onwards, only coming back home when he became too exhausted to open his eyes, which seemed to happen every few weeks.

She needed job security, so father made her the equal co-owner of Forshale Falls. My god did he love her.

I almost started believing she was my step-mom. That was until I came to understand the full situation.

She was married. Married to a military man. He ended up out of town more and more by the time she met my father.

My father was honestly the best thing that ever happened to their marriage, with him erasing the financial stress that her husband had left her in, Rae no longer had much about him to complain about (outside of his long, military-based absences, obviously).

Rae even had a son, one named Eric, fully grown and proud. My father only met Eric once, when he came to Forshale Falls to buy a mirror. It was a rather uninteresting encounter.

Time and overwork eventually got the best of my father. He spent his last days working, weary and weak and pleasant.

In those last few months, he rekindled his relationship with Eva. She was incredibly appreciative of that, even if things were still a little awkward between the two of them.

One day she came to visit the store, to visit my father, and she ended up collapsing then and there. She died of old age.

She died of old age in Forshale Falls.

A week later, my father collapsed on the grassy ground of his store out of sheer exhaustion, essentially putting the store into the rarest of states: it was closed.

A store that had hours ago held a dozen people was just home to him now.

In the early hours of the next morning, he managed to bring himself over to the temporary bed he kept at the store. Unfortunately, he never really woke up.

My father came to Willow Creek an old man, and he came wanting to achieve three things: he wanted to become a father, he wanted to find love, and he wanted to start a successful business.

He became my adoptive, and often-absent father.

He found passionate platonic and unrequited love from a woman who appreciated him dearly.

He started a successful open-air television store that funded many lives and helped many people. I’d even go so far as to say it was the most successful open-air television/plastic-cat hybrid-store to ever have existed.

He may not have thought he was successful, he may not have thought he accomplished all he wanted to have accomplished, but I’ve decided for him.

He was a success.

End of Prologue.