The factory closed on a Tuesday in October. I was at work when the lights went out—not all of them, just the ones in Building C, where we'd been putting together transmissions for twenty-three years. Foreman came out and said there'd been an electrical issue. He didn't say the word that everyone was thinking. I didn't either. We just packed up our tools and walked to our cars in the parking lot that was half empty, which in a town of eight thousand people meant a third of the men who used to clock in at six were already gone.

That was ten years ago. The lights in Building C never came back on. Neither did the people.

My name is Sid Miller. I'm forty-five, which in this part of Ohio means I'm old but not old enough to collect. I work at a scrap yard now, sorting metal the way I used to sort transmissions, except the metal doesn't care if I do a good job and neither does anyone else.

My wife Annie used to work at a Walmart. She quit when they cut her hours to two days a week, which was the Walmart way of saying we didn't need you but we also didn't need to tell you that directly. Annie's a good woman. She bakes bread on Sundays and talks to the plants on the windowsill like they're the neighbors she never had.

We had a daughter. Her name was Amy. She was six months old, and she was illegal.

The Federal Population Control Act had been on the books for four years by the time Amy was born. It was supposed to be temporary—a measure to manage resource allocation during a period of economic transition. But temporary things have a way of becoming permanent when they benefit the people who write the laws.

Lyle Covin lived across the street. He was fifty-three, divorced, unemployed, and supported by a combination of disability benefits and food stamps that he managed to stretch into something that looked almost like a lifestyle. Lyle spent his days on his porch drinking beer and watching the street the way a man watches a river that he knows will eventually flood.

He found out about Amy the way these things always get found out: through the sound of a baby crying at 2 AM when the walls are thin and the whiskey isn't strong enough to make you sleep anyway.

He came to our door at noon the next day, when I was at the scrap yard and Annie was alone with Amy. He stood in the doorway and said, in a voice that was almost conversational, "I know what you've got. And I know what happens when the state finds out."

Annie didn't cry. She didn't shout. She just stood there holding Amy and looking at Lyle the way you look at a man who has handed you a bill for something you didn't order.

Lyle didn't want much at first. A hundred dollars a month. It sounded like nothing to a man who made twelve an hour. It was everything to a man who made twelve an hour and had a wife and a baby and a house that was slowly falling apart because the property taxes were higher than the house was worth.

He raised it. Two hundred. Three hundred. By the time he was done, he was taking half of what I brought home, and I was skipping breakfast so Annie could buy formula, and Amy was crying less and less because babies learn quickly in this world that crying doesn't always mean someone will come.

Then Mr. Green showed up.

He appeared on our lawn one Saturday morning, standing by the fence that separated our yard from the vacant lot next door. He was tall and thin, wearing clothes that looked like they'd been bought at a thrift store by someone who didn't know how thrift store clothes were supposed to fit. He had no eyebrows. He wore a nose that looked like it had been glued on.

"Morning," he said. His voice was quiet and polite, the kind of voice that makes you feel like he's asking permission to exist.

"Morning," I said. I didn't ask what he wanted. People like Mr. Green don't want anything. They just are.

He started showing up every day. He fixed the leak in our roof before I could stop him. He planted a garden in the backyard—tomatoes, beans, something that looked like kale—and he watered it every evening while Annie and I sat on the porch and watched him work. He smoked cigarettes but never spoke much. When I asked him his name, he said "Green." When I asked him where he was from, he said, "A place beyond the sun." I assumed he was joking.

He was not joking. But he was not telling the truth either. He was telling a version of the truth that was simpler than the real one, and I think he did it because the real one was too complicated even for a man like him.

When the federal workers came, they didn't come with rifles or handcuffs. They came with clipboards and forms and the kind of polite authority that comes from men who have never had to explain to a woman why taking her child is the right thing to do. They had a social worker named Patricia who looked at Annie and Amy and then looked at our house—the peeling paint, the broken step, the garden that Mr. Green had planted—and she nodded the way you nod when you're confirming something you already suspected.

"They don't have the resources," she said. "You don't have the resources. This isn't punishment. It's logistics."

I looked at Mr. Green. He was standing by the fence, watching. He looked at me with eyes that were the color of a sky you've seen but never understood.

I looked back at Amy. She was sleeping in Annie's arms, her mouth open, her fingers curled into a fist the way babies' fingers do when they're dreaming about something they can't name.

Mr. Green walked away that afternoon. He packed his things—there weren't many: a bag, a blanket, a cigarette pack that he hadn't smoked—and he drove off in a car that looked like it had been held together with rust and hope. He didn't look back.

The social workers took Amy on a Thursday. Annie didn't scream. She just held onto me and pressed her face into my shoulder and let the tears come, quiet and steady, the way rain comes when it's been threatening all day.

I went to the scrap yard the next Monday. I sorted metal. I made twelve dollars an hour. Lyle Covin was on his porch, drinking beer, watching the street. He didn't look at me. I didn't look at him.

Annie sits in the house now. She talks to the plants on the windowsill. She bakes bread on Sundays. She doesn't cry anymore. She just sits and watches the garden that Mr. Green planted, and the tomatoes have grown wild and untended, and they're red and perfect and nobody is eating them.