Billy woke up at seven. The apartment was cold. The power had been off for two weeks. He sat on the edge of the mattress, swung his legs over the side, and drank the beer that had been open since yesterday. It was warm and flat and tasted like metal. He did not care.

The apartment was in Corktown. Or it had been Corktown once. Now it was just a building with broken windows and graffiti on the door and a porch that sagged like a tired face. Three rooms. Kitchen with no stove. Bedroom with a mattress on the floor. Bathroom with a toilet that only worked if you poured a bucket of water into the tank.

Billy lived here because there was nowhere else to go.

He got up and put on the same clothes he had worn the day before. Jeans with a tear in the knee. A sweater that had holes at the elbows. He did not wash them. Washing cost money. Money cost work. Work cost things he did not have.

He walked to the DHH office on West Grand Boulevard. The line started at six. He got there at six forty-five. There were already thirty people ahead of him. A woman with three children stood at the front of the line, shivering in a dress that was too thin for the weather. The children were silent. They had learned not to cry.

Billy waited. Three hours. He stood in line on cracked pavement and watched snow melt into grey puddles at his feet. A man in front of him asked, "You alright, brother?"

"Fine," Billy said.

At the window, a woman with tired eyes looked at him over her glasses. "Name?"

"Billy Harlan."

She typed. "Last time you were here was November."

"I know."

"What changed?"

"Nothing."

She typed more. Slid a card across the counter. "Twenty-two dollars and forty cents. That's all we have."

Billy took the card. Walked out. Stood on the sidewalk for a minute and looked at the sky. It was grey the way the sky in Detroit always was, like a ceiling you could touch if you reached high enough.

He thought about the factory. Ford Motor on I-94. He had worked there for twenty-two years. Started in '86, thirty years old, strong back, clean record, no problems. They gave him a badge and a locker and a job on Line Three, assembling transmission housings.

The plant closed in '08. Then reopened in '11 under new management. Same building. New rules. No safety inspections. No overtime. No union rep allowed past the gate.

Billy knew about the safety issues. He had seen the machines running without guards. He had seen the chemical fumes without ventilation. He had told his supervisor. His supervisor had told him to mind his own business.

On a Tuesday in March, the press on Line Two jammed. Billy reached in to clear it. The machine started. His left leg went in at the knee. He heard the bone break before he felt the pain. Three other guys on the line got caught in the conveyor. One died. Two went home with permanent damage.

The company settled. Three thousand dollars each. A non-disclosure agreement they made him sign in a language he did not understand. He signed it because he needed the money and the alternative was nothing.

He went to the hospital to see the dead man's wife. A tall woman with grey in her hair and hands like shovels. She sat on the edge of a hospital bed where her husband's body lay under a sheet and did not look at Billy when he walked in.

"I'm sorry," Billy said.

She said nothing.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

She looked at him then, and her eyes were red and raw and full of something Billy could not name and could not face. And he wanted to bow. He wanted to bend his head and show her that he was sorry. That he had tried to warn them. That he had signed the NDA because he was scared and broke and forty years old with a bad leg and three kids who needed him.

But he could not bow.

Because bowing to her would mean bowing to the thing that had happened—the press, the jam, the reach, the crush—and he could not bow to that. He could not make himself small enough to hold all of it.

His ex-wife called from Michigan Avenue. A glass building with a receptionist who smiled when she said the word. "Billy, the court ruling is next week. The children will be placed with your sister in Ohio. She's agreed to take both of them."

"Okay," Billy said.

"Do you want to talk to them? Before?"

"No. That would be cruel."

"Are you alright?"

"Fine."

He hung up. Walked to the factory gate. The new manager was there, a thin man in a suit that cost more than Billy's car, talking on a phone. He looked at Billy and nodded. Billy did not nod back.

The manager said, "Mr. Harlan. Good to see you."

Billy looked at him. The manager smiled. Billy did not. He turned and walked away and sat on the curb in the parking lot and opened a beer from the six-pack in his jacket pocket and drank it and watched the smoke rise from the stack and did not think about anything at all.