The third month after they closed the plant, Mike went up to the attic because the trash cans were full. Not garbage cans—the big black plastic ones on the curb. They had overflowed three days ago and the smell was something he could not get out of his clothes.

He found the book on a shelf behind a box of Christmas decorations and a winter coat with holes in the elbows. It was thin. The cover was a dark blue cloth, worn at the corners. There was writing on the front in a language he did not recognize—curly letters that looked Polish, maybe. His grandfather had come from somewhere in Poland before the war, through Ellis Island, with nothing in his pockets but this book and a photograph of a woman he never talked about.

Mike sat on the floor and opened it. The pages were yellow. Most of it was in that same foreign hand. But halfway through, there were translations typed on a manual typewriter, the letters uneven, some keys hitting harder than others. Breathing exercises. Specific postures. Rhythms of muscle contraction and release. Energy cultivation. The kind of thing you would find in a library book nobody had checked out since 1974.

He flipped through it twice. Then he closed it and put it in his pocket and went back downstairs.

The apartment was cold. The window in the bedroom did not close all the way. You could hear the wind when it came through the gap, a thin whistling sound like someone blowing across the top of a bottle. He turned on the space heater. It clicked on and made a low rumbling noise that filled the room but did not really warm it.

He made coffee. Instant. The kind in the jar that says "Rich and Smooth" and tastes like burnt dirt. He drank it standing up at the counter, looking out at the parking lot where a pickup truck sat on cinder blocks next to a rusted-out Corolla.

"总比整天坐着强," he thought. Then he laughed at himself for thinking in Polish and went to the kitchen table and opened the book again.

The first exercise was simple. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Breathe in through the nose for four counts. Hold for two. Exhale through the mouth for six. He tried it in the kitchen. It felt stupid. He was forty-five years old and he was doing breathing exercises in his underwear and the space heater was making that noise and he had exactly eighty-seven dollars and twelve cents in his bank account and his right knee was aching the way it always did when the weather changed.

He did four breaths. Then he yawned so hard his jaw cracked.

"You're a genius," he said to the empty room.

The second morning he did it again. This time in the bedroom, where it was quieter. The couple next door was arguing through the wall. Something about money and a dog and whether or not someone had actually left their keys at the bar last night. Mike could hear the words but could not make out the sentences. He focused on the counting instead.

In for four. Hold for two. Out for six.

He did ten. Then he sat down on the bed and rubbed his knee and drank the rest of his coffee.

He told Jerry about it at the bar on Thursday. The Rusty Nail. The sign outside had the "R" missing, so it read "Tsy Nail," and the neon buzzed in a way that made Mike think about electric eels. Inside, the beer was warm, the carpet had stains you could not identify but could probably guess, and the owner, Earl, remembered everyone's name because everyone's name was basically the same as their father's and their father's father before that.

Jerry was in his usual spot at the end of the bar. He looked worse than the last time Mike saw him. Not a lot worse. Just a little. Like a photograph that had been left in the sun too long.

"Had a drink?" Jerry said.

"I had a beer."

"You had a beer. That's different."

They clinked glasses. Jerry ordered another. Mike stared at his.

"I started doing these exercises," Mike said.

"What kind."

"My grandfather's. From the book."

Jerry tilted his head. "What kind of exercises."

"Breathing."

Jerry stared at him for a moment. Then he put his glass down very carefully and looked at his hands. "Fuck," he said. "I need that too. I can barely breathe lately."

Mike didn't say anything. Jerry didn't either. They drank.

Jerry didn't come back to the bar the following week. Or the week after. Mike found out from Earl, who said something about a back injury at the Amazon warehouse and that Jerry was working different hours now, or maybe not at all. Earl didn't know. He shrugged and polished a glass with a rag that was already too dirty to be useful.

Mike kept breathing. Some days he did twelve breaths. Some days he did four. The day he got the notice from the landlord about the rent increase, he did twenty and they shook so much he had to sit down halfway through.

Dr. Patel looked at his file and then at him and then back at the file. She was thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Indian-American. She had been at the clinic for ten years and she had the tired eyes of someone who had seen too many people who looked like Mike and did not want to be there.

"Your blood pressure is better than last time," she said, not looking up from the chart.

Mike shifted in his seat. The paper on the exam table crinkled under him. "I guess so."

"You've been sleeping better."

"I guess."

"Mike, you're drinking less."

"I guess I am."

She finally looked at him. "You sure? Because you said—last time—you said you quit."

"I quit."

"You quit. Or you're drinking less."

Mike considered this. "Same thing."

She didn't argue. She never did. She wrote something on the chart, told him to come back in six months, and that was it. The next person in the waiting room was a woman with a cough and a teenager with a sprained wrist and Mike went back to his truck and sat there for a minute with the engine off and thought about whether he had enough for the drive home.

The phone rang on a Tuesday. It was three in the afternoon. Nobody ever called him at three in the afternoon. He let it ring twice and then picked it up.

"Mike."

It took him three seconds to recognize the voice. Jake. His son. Nineteen years old and somewhere in Columbus at a place called "Oakridge Recovery Center" or something like that. A detox facility. The kind of place you went when your body needed heroin less than your head told you it didn't.

Mike said nothing.

"I'm clean," Jake said. "Eighty-nine days."

Mike heard a car horn outside. Someone's dog barking. The refrigerator kicking on in the apartment next door. He held the phone and looked at the coffee stain on his shirt that had been there since April and he could not figure out what to say.

"I wanted to tell you," Jake said. "Before you hear it from someone else."

Mike's throat felt tight. "Good," he said. "That's... good."

A pause. Jake was breathing on the other end. Mike could hear it. Not metaphorically—the phone carried the sound, small and quick, the way a teenager breathes when they are nervous and trying not to show it.

"Can I... can I talk to you? About something?"

Mike closed his eyes. "Yeah."

"I want to ask you something."

Mike looked around the apartment. The peeling paint on the ceiling. The microwave that only worked if you held the door shut with your elbow. The book on the kitchen table, its spine cracked, a beer ring stained around it where he had set his glass down without a coaster.

"I'm doing something," Mike said. "I'm... doing a thing."

"What kind of thing."

"Breathing."

Another pause. Longer this time. Mike thought Jake would hang up. He thought about hanging up first but his hand would not move.

"Can you teach me?" Jake said.

Mike's mouth opened. He wanted to say yes. He wanted to say it right away, like he had answered a work order on the line back when he could weld steel faster than any man in the bay and the supervisor used to nod at him like a man who understood something that could not be written in a performance review.

But his throat had closed. It was a physical thing, like his vocal cords had decided not to work for him today.

"Wait till you get out," he said instead.

"Okay," Jake said. "Okay. Thanks, Dad."

The word hit him in the chest like a wrench dropped from overhead. He did not flinch. He just held the phone and listened to Jake breathing and then the call ended.

That night he practiced for an hour.

He did not know where the hour came from. He usually did ten or twelve breaths if he was good and maybe twenty if something was wrong. But that night he stood in the bedroom, listening to the couple next door stop fighting and start crying, and he breathed and he breathed and he breathed until his legs shook and his hands shook and he had to sit down on the edge of the bed and hold onto his knees and keep going because sitting was not stopping and stopping was not an option.

When he finished, he was sweating. Not heavy sweating. Just enough that his shirt was damp at the small of his back. He stood up and walked to the window and pulled it open the rest of the way, because the gap was not enough, because he wanted the cold air even though it was November and the heater was still clicking and rumbling and not really doing its job.

He looked out at the factory across the street. The one that had been closed for two years. The security light was out so you could not even see the building well, just a dark shape where a dark shape used to be, which is to say a place where something had happened before and now nothing happened anymore.

He went to sleep on the couch because he did not want to think about the bedroom.

Jake came home on a Friday. Mike knew it was Friday because the radio said so, or maybe because the calendar on his wall had a red circle on it that he had drawn three weeks ago when he forgot why he had drawn it and decided to leave it there.

He opened the door and Jake was standing there with a plastic bag containing maybe eight belongings and a bus ticket and a look on his face that was not happy and not sad and not anything Mike could name so he just said, "Hey," and Jake said, "Hey," and they stood in the doorway and Mike thought about hugging him and did not and Jake did not either and then Jake walked in and put the bag down and looked around the apartment like he had never seen it before, which was fair.

They sat on the couch. The couch had a tear in the armrest where Mike's sweatshirt caught every time he sat down, and he picked at the torn fabric with his thumb without thinking about it.

Jake looked at the book on the table. "Is that it?"

"Yeah."

"Your grandfather's."

"Yeah. From Poland."

Jake sat down next to him but not too close. There were three beer cans between them on the coffee table. Empty. From last week. Mike should have thrown them out. He would get to it.

"Can you show me?" Jake said.

Mike stood up. He felt his knee pop. He ignored it. He stood the way the book said, feet shoulder-width apart, and he breathed in through his nose for four, held for two, out through his mouth for six. He opened his eyes. Jake was watching him.

"Like that?" Jake said.

"Like that."

Jake tried. He was bad at it. His breathing was uneven. He did three breaths and then stopped and laughed—a sharp, embarrassed laugh, the kind a nineteen-year-old makes when he realizes he is doing something his father's age.

"This is stupid," Jake said, but he did it again. And again. He did six breaths before he stopped and sat down hard on the couch. "I'm not good at this."

"You're nineteen," Mike said. "You're not good at a lot of things."

Jake looked at him. There was something in his face. Mike could not place it. Anger? Relief? The absence of something he had carried for a long time and could not name.

"Teach me," Jake said again.

"I'm trying."

They did it together after that. Mike breathing in and Jake breathing in, not perfectly in sync, not that either of them cared. Four counts. Two. Six. They did twelve. Then twenty. Then Mike stopped and counted and he had lost track and he did not start counting again.

They sat on the couch and breathed and the refrigerator clicked on and the couple next door started arguing about something new and the space heater made its noise and the window let the cold in and the beer cans sat on the table and the factory across the street sat where it had always sat and nothing changed and everything was the same and Mike thought: this is all there is.

And maybe that was enough.

The morning Jake decided to stay, Mike woke up before the alarm. He did not have an alarm but he woke up at six anyway because he had been waking up at six for twenty years and the body does not always listen to the mind when the mind has changed its plans.

He stood in the bedroom, next to the window that did not close all the way. The wind came in through the gap and made the whistling sound. He pulled the window up a little more, because he could, and the cold hit his face and he was not sure if he liked it or not.

Jake was in the other room. Sleeping on the couch, probably. Or standing at the kitchen counter, looking at the coffee jar and wondering if instant coffee counted as a meal. Mike did not go to check.

He did his breathing exercises. Four counts. Two. Six. He did thirty this time. The numbers did not matter. The numbers had never mattered. But counting was something, and something was better than nothing, and nothing was what he had had before the book, before the breathing, before Jake on the phone saying he was eighty-nine days clean and Mike could hear him breathing and did not know what to do with that information.

He finished. He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed and listened to the apartment. The heater. The wind. Jake moving around in the kitchen. A siren somewhere far away that would never come close enough to matter.

He went to the kitchen. Jake was holding two mugs. He put one on the table in front of Mike. The coffee was already in it, brown and steaming and the kind of hot that burns your tongue the first sip no matter how many times you have done it.

"Thanks," Mike said.

Jake nodded. He was wearing the same clothes he had come home in, except for the jacket, which Mike had given him from the hook by the door because it was colder outside than it looked and Jake would say he was fine and then he would be cold and that was not Mike's problem anymore. Not right now.

They drank. Neither of them spoke.

Outside, the sky was gray. The factory was gray. The trucks on the street were gray. The world was a color you could describe with one word and be done with it.

Mike finished his coffee. He set the mug down. He picked up his keys from the counter. He did not say where he was going. Jake did not ask.

"Be back later," Mike said.

"Okay," Jake said.

Mike opened the door. The cold air came in from the hallway and then he was in the hallway and he was taking the stairs down because the elevator had been broken since March and the super said he would fix it and then he would not.

Outside, the wind hit his face. It was colder than he expected. It was always colder than he expected.

He walked toward the corner. He did not know where he was going. He would figure it out when he got there.

That was all.