The folding chair had one leg shorter than the others, so Ray had wedged a bottle cap under it and called it even. It was July in Youngstown and the heat was the kind that made the air itself feel heavy, like breathing through a wet towel.

Ray sat on the corner of Maple and Sixth, where the abandoned gas station met the sidewalk that led to the closed-down Youngstown Sheet and Tube parking lot. He had a card taped to a piece of plywood: READS MINDS — NO CHARGE — IF YOU GOT SOMETHING BURNING, ASK ME.

He had been sitting there for about four hours. He did not actually read minds. He read faces. There was a difference. Minds were private. Faces, when you had lived long enough and broken down enough, tended to tell the truth whether the person wanted them to or not.

The first person to stop was a guy Ray knew — Tony from the bar down the street. Tony asked if Ray could tell him if his wife was faithful. Ray said she was. Tony said he knew that. Ray said I know you know that. Tony threw a quarter in the coffee can and walked away.

Then she came.

She wore a trench coat in July, which told Ray two things: she had nowhere else to put whatever she was carrying, and she was trying to look like she belonged somewhere she didn't. She was maybe thirty-eight, with a face that had been pretty once and was now something else — something harder and more interesting, like a building that had been damaged by fire and turned into an apartment.

"Can you read minds?" she asked. Her voice was Ohio, but not Youngstown Ohio. It was northern Ohio, maybe Toledo, maybe the coast.

"I read what people can't keep to themselves," Ray said.

She sat on the curb. He watched her do it — the way she positioned herself, turned slightly toward him but angled toward the street. Someone who was ready to run.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Maggie."

"Maggie what?"

"Just Maggie."

He nodded. He had learned over "god knows how long" in the recovery program and "god knows how long" before that that names were people's first defense and their last gift. You didn't get either without asking.

He reached across and took her hand. Not romantically. Just — to anchor. He had learned this at the recovery meetings, the way the old-timers would take your hand and hold it while you talked about the thing you couldn't talk about. Physical contact. Grounding. It wasn't magic. It was biology. Oxytocin. Nervous systems talking to each other without words.

Maggie's hand was shaking. Not noticeably. But Ray had spent time in factories, and he knew the tremor that comes from running on adrenaline and no sleep.

"You're not here for a reading," he said.

"I didn't say I was here for a reading."

"You didn't have to. You've been walking past three men on this block who looked like they could use someone to talk to, and you kept walking. That means you're looking for someone specific. Which means you're carrying something that has a name."

Maggie's jaw tightened. He saw it — the clench that meant she was two seconds from standing up and walking away, or two seconds from saying something she had been carrying for a long time.

She chose the second option.

"My brother worked at Sheet and Tube," she said. It came out flat, like she had practiced it. "He worked there for eleven years. They closed in two thousand and one. He didn't — he couldn't — he found a way to make it stop a year later. I'm not saying how. I don't need you to know that."

Ray held her hand. He did not let go. He had learned in recovery that sometimes the most you could offer someone was the simple act of not withdrawing.

"I drove past his grave yesterday," Maggie continued. The words were coming faster now, like a dam that had developed a crack. "And I stood there for twenty minutes, and I realized I was angry. Not at the factory. Not at the company. At him. For leaving. For making me the sister who has to tell people he's dead and can't say anything else."

She turned her hand over and looked at her own palm like she had never seen it before.

"So I drove up here because I heard about this — this guy who sits on a corner and tells people what's eating them. And I wanted to see if he was right. If he could look at me and tell me what I'm carrying. And I guess I also wanted to see if there was anyone in this town who could say something that would make it stop hurting."

Ray was quiet for a long time. The heat hummed around them. Tony was still visible in the doorway of the bar, watching. The shopkeeper across the street had stopped sweeping and was just standing there with his broom.

"I can't make it stop hurting," Ray said finally. "Nobody can. I know guys who can — preachers, doctors, the guys who hand out pills at the VA. They'll all tell you something different. But they'll all tell you it stops. And it doesn't. Not really. What happens is you learn the shape of the hurt, and you learn to carry it without it cutting your hands every time you move."

Maggie was crying. Not dramatically. Just tears running down her face that she didn't wipe away.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be. Crying is the body doing something the mind can't do alone."

They sat there for another ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Ray lost track. The crowd had grown — a few more stragglers had stopped, drawn by the sight of a woman crying on a curb and a fat man in a tank top sitting next to her holding her hand like they were at a bus stop.

Eventually, Maggie stood up. She wiped her face with her sleeve. She looked at Ray the way people look at things they will not remember until years later, when they are somewhere else and something happens — a smell, a sound — and suddenly they are back on this corner and they understand that this was the moment they started carrying the hurt differently.

"Thank you," she said. It was the first honest thing she had said.

Ray nodded. "See you around, Maggie."

She walked down the street. She did not look back. Ray watched her go until she turned the corner and was gone. Then he picked up his quarter from the sidewalk where she had apparently dropped it, dropped it into the coffee can, and sat back on his folding chair with the short leg.

The heat did not stop. Nothing stopped. But somewhere on Maple Street, a woman was carrying something slightly lighter than she had been, and that was, in Youngstown in July, its own kind of victory.