I.

Frank McCullough woke at six in the morning. He sat on the edge of the bed and smoked one cigarette. The cigarette was the kind he bought at the convenience store on Main Street, the cheapest brand they had, the one that made his throat scratch. He smoked it sitting on the edge of the bed, the way he had smoked cigarettes for thirty years, in the same chair, in the same room, in the same house in the same town that was slowly disappearing.

After the cigarette, he went to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. The coffee was from the day before. It was cold. He drank it anyway. Cold coffee was still coffee.

Mary was in the bedroom. He could hear her breathing through the door. It was a wet sound, the sound of fluid in the lungs, the sound of a machine that was running out of fuel. He stood in the doorway and looked at her. She was sleeping. Or trying to. The oxygen tube ran from the cylinder in the corner to her nose, and the cylinder hissed softly, a sound that had become the background music of their lives.

He said, How are you today?

She opened her eyes and looked at him. I don't know, she said.

He said, Yeah.

He went back to the kitchen and sat at the table and looked out the window at the backyard. The grass was overgrown. The fence was leaning. The well pump in the corner had not worked in six months. He had not fixed it. There was no point.

II.

Frank went to the convenience store at ten. The store was called Miller's, though nobody named Miller had owned it for twenty years. It was owned by a guy named Tommy now, young Tommy, who was about the same age as Frank's son Tommy, though Frank had not thought of that connection in years.

Tommy was behind the counter, reading a newspaper. He looked up when Frank entered. Morning, Mr. M.

Morning, Frank said. Beer.

He took six cans of the cheapest beer they had and put them on the counter. Tommy rang them up. Gas went up again, Tommy said. Two cents a gallon.

Frank said, Yeah.

At the register, Frank also bought a case of bottled water. The well water had changed taste two weeks ago. It was not bad—just different. Metallic, with a hint of something sweet that was worse than bad. Frank had tasted it and remembered the taste of metal from his years in the mine, and he had decided that bottled water was cheaper than a water test.

Old Joe was sitting on the steps outside the store, the way he sat every day. His eyes were closed. He was not sleeping. He was just sitting, leaning against the brick wall, smelling of whiskey and old sweat. Frank looked at him and said, Joe.

Joe did not respond. Frank looked at him for a moment longer and then walked to his truck.

III.

The truck was a 1978 Ford, rusted at the wheel wells, missing a side mirror, with a radio that only picked up one station. Frank drove it home slowly, the case of water on the passenger seat, the six-pack of beer in a bag on the floor.

He unloaded everything without speaking. He put the water in the pantry, next to the cans of soup and the boxes of crackers that Mary had bought at a time when shopping felt like preparation for something. He put the beer in the refrigerator, next to the half-empty jars of pickles and the bottle of ketchup that had not been opened in months.

He sat on the porch and smoked a cigarette. The sun was high and white and hot. The sky was the color of faded denim. A fly landed on his hand and he did not swat it.

He thought about Tommy, his son. Three years ago, Tommy had come to the house and stood in the living room and said, Dad, I'm leaving. I'm going to Chicago. I got a job driving trucks.

Frank had said, Okay.

Tommy had looked at him, surprised by the lack of reaction. You okay with that?

Frank had said, You're a grown man. Where you go is your business.

Tommy had stood there for a moment longer, as though expecting something—pleading, begging, a speech about family and duty and the mines and the town and the land. But Frank had given him nothing. Just the word okay, and the fly on his hand, and the cigarette that he had not finished.

Tommy had left. He had not called. He had not written. Three years, and not a word. Frank had not tried to reach him. There was no point.

IV.

Mary's condition worsened in November. The doctor came in the morning, checked her lungs, listened to her breathing with a stethoscope that felt cold against her skin, and told Frank in the driveway that she might not make it through winter.

Frank stood in the driveway and listened. He nodded. He said, Okay. He said, Thank you, Doctor. He walked the Doctor to his car and watched him drive away.

That afternoon, Mary told him she was afraid.

Frank sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand. Her hand was light in his, the bones sharp beneath the skin, the skin like paper.

I'm afraid, she said.

I know, Frank said.

What will happen to you? she asked.

I'll try, he said.

She closed her eyes. He held her hand until it stopped moving.

Old Joe died on a Thursday. He was found on Sunday, three days later, by a man who came to borrow tools and found Joe's body in the back room of the bar, slumped over a table, a half-empty glass of whiskey in front of him. Nobody knew who killed him. Nobody knew if he had been killed. He was probably just old, and tired, and done.

Frank heard about it from Tommy at the store. He said, Hmm, when he heard the news, and went on buying his beer.

In December, Frank sat on the porch every evening and watched the sun go down. The sky was gray most days in December, the color of coal dust, and the wind carried the smell of burning from the power plant ten miles east. He smoked one cigarette each evening, sometimes two, and watched the light fade and the stars come out and the cold settle into the wood of the porch and the metal of the rail and the stone of the steps.

One evening, an ant climbed out of a crack in the porch floor and crawled up his shoe leg. Frank felt it on his ankle. He looked down and saw the ant, small and black, moving steadily upward. He did not move. He did not swat it. He sat still and watched the ant climb his leg and reach his knee and continue upward, toward his hand, toward his face, toward whatever it was that ants were climbing toward when there was nothing left to climb on but a man sitting on a porch in a town that was disappearing.

The sun went down. The sky turned gray-blue. The stars came out. The ant reached his hand and paused on his thumb, its antennae moving, sensing, searching.

Frank looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at the sky. Then he looked at the house, where Mary was breathing in the dark.

He did not know if he would get up tomorrow. He did not know if anything would change. He did not know if anything had ever changed.

He planned to try.

OTMES v2: DR-2010-OhioEconomicDecline-4ACT-1250W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM