The coffee at the gas station tasted like it had been sitting on the warmer since morning, which is exactly what Candy expected. She drank it anyway because it was three dollars and that was less than she wanted to spend on anything that was not rent.

Sunday afternoon. The parking lot outside the high school gym was empty except for a pickup truck with a missing tailgate and a kid on a bicycle who was going too fast for his own good. Candy sat on a bench that had been painted green once, maybe ten years ago, and watched the kids run across the asphalt like they had nowhere else to be.

She did not have anywhere else to be. Her shift at the pharmacy ended at five. It was four-thirty. She had an hour before she needed to be home to microwave whatever was in her refrigerator, which was probably nothing interesting.

Her phone was in her pocket. It was an old Samsung that had survived two drops on concrete and one encounter with a washing machine. She did not turn it on because she knew what was on it. Two text messages from Debbie asking for money. One from her boss at the pharmacy asking if she could cover Saturday. And one from Mark, three days old, saying he was in town and wanted to catch up.

She did not text him back. She did not delete it either. She just sat on the bench and watched the cold Sunday light move across the parking lot.

Derek Sanderson showed up at the grocery store on a Wednesday, which was the kind of thing that made Candy think he had been watching her or that he had not — both possibilities were equally annoying.

He was standing in the cereal aisle looking at boxes the way people look at maps when they are lost. He held a box of Special K in one hand and a box of Corn Flakes in the other, and his face had the expression of someone who had never had to choose between breakfast cereals on his own.

"Need help?" Candy said. She did not mean to say it out loud. It just came out.

He turned. When he saw her, something in his face shifted — not a smile, not exactly, but a movement toward something like relief.

"Candy. Hey."

"You shop here?"

"Sometimes. My ex — I mean, my daughter's mom — she has a list. I just buy what is on the list."

"Which one is harder? Buying the stuff or explaining why you forgot one of the things on the list."

He laughed. It was a small laugh, the kind that comes from somewhere lower than the throat. "You would not believe how hard it is to explain that you forgot the peanut butter."

"I believe it. Peanut butter is essential. It is the backbone of civilization."

They stood in the cereal aisle for five minutes, which was longer than either of them expected. Candy bought eggs and bread and the cheap ground beef that was on sale. Derek bought peanut butter, which felt like a statement.

At the checkout, the cashier — a teenager with blue hair who looked at them the way teenagers look at middle-aged people who are being nice to each other — scanned their items and said nothing. Sometimes silence is the only honest thing a cashier can offer.

The factory parking lot was the size of a football field and mostly empty. Three hundred trucks had left over the past month, each one carrying something that had been made by people whose names Candy knew. Mike from line four. Rosa from the cafeteria. Old Joe, who had been here since before Candy was born and who had a face like a crumpled map.

Candy stood at the edge of the lot and watched Derek stand at the factory window, watching the trucks leave. He was forty-three and he looked fifty. Not because of the job — though the job was killing him, slowly, the way a slow knife kills — but because he was a man who had spent his life running a machine and now the machine was being disassembled and he was not sure what he was without it.

"They're moving everything to Mexico next month," he said. He did not turn around. "Three hundred people. That is not a number. That is three hundred families. Three hundred kids who will have to find new schools. Three hundred wives who will have to figure out how to pay the mortgage."

"I know."

"They told me to tell them. To go out there and say it. So I did. I stood in front of them and I said it. And I did not cry. I stood there and I said it and I did not cry."

Candy looked at him. He was still facing the window. His hands were in his pockets. His shoulders were squared. It was the posture of a man holding himself together with muscle memory.

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.

"Because you are the only person who does not want anything from me right now. Everyone else either wants a severance package or wants me to lie and say it will be okay. You just — stand here. With me. In the parking lot."

She did not have an answer for that. So she stood there, in the parking lot of a factory that was closing, next to a man who was falling apart in the most controlled way possible, and the cold Ohio wind moved between them like something that had nowhere else to go.

The shutdown notice went out on a Monday. By Wednesday, the word had spread through the town like a disease — not the dramatic, dramatic kind of disease, but the slow, grinding kind. People were losing things they could not replace. Not money, exactly. Money could be found. It was the routine that was gone. The clocking in. The break room. The guy who sat next to you and told jokes that were not funny but you laughed anyway because he was your guy.

Candy went to Derek's house on a Thursday. She needed to tell Jake that he had to transfer schools — his mother had lost her job at the diner and could not afford the tuition anymore. She expected to find Jake at home, probably asleep on the couch with the TV on.

She found Derek instead. He was sitting at his kitchen table with a stack of foreclosure papers in front of him. He was not reading them. He was just looking at them. His face was blank in the way that blank is not empty — it is full of everything that has happened and nothing that will happen.

Candy stood in the doorway for a moment. Then she pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him.

They sat in silence. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. The clock on the wall ticked. A car passed outside. Somewhere, a dog barked. These are the sounds of a life that continues whether you want it to or not.

Finally, Derek spoke. "You wrote something on a napkin at that restaurant. I never found out what it was."

Candy told him.

He laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh, and it sounded like a sound she had not known was possible — rough and real and completely unguarded.

"Shut the fuck up," he said. "That is the most honest thing anyone has written to me in ten years."

She looked at him across the table. In the kitchen light, he looked tired and ordinary and completely human. For a moment, she thought about saying something. Something that would change everything. But she did not. She just nodded and stood up and walked home.

Mark called on Saturday. He sounded the same as he always sounded — steady, practical, with the quiet certainty of a man who had made good decisions and believed in them. He wanted Candy to come to Cincinnati. They could start over. She could get a better job. He had a two-bedroom apartment. It was a reasonable offer.

She did not say no. She did not say yes. She said she would think about it.

On Sunday afternoon, she sat on the bench outside the high school gym. It was cold. The gas station coffee was in a paper cup that was leaking through the bottom and wetting her fingers. She watched kids run across the parking lot, their breath visible in the air, their laughter carrying across the asphalt like something that did not belong to this town at all.

She thought about calling Derek. She thought about calling Mark. She thought about calling nobody.

She finished her coffee, threw the cup in a bin, and drove home. The radio was off. The windows were up. She was thinking about nothing in particular, which was, she decided, probably the best thing anyone could do on a Sunday afternoon.

Author Note & Copyright: