The neon sign buzzed. That was the first thing you noticed when you walked into The Last Call — not the smell of stale beer and fried food, not the rows of bottles behind the bar, not the three men sitting at the corner table arguing about baseball. The buzz. The neon LAST CALL sign buzzed like a fly trapped in a jar, and if you listened to it long enough, it sounded almost like a voice saying something you almost understood.

Bill Henderson wiped the bar. This was his ritual. He opened at six in the morning, flipped on the lights, and the buzz started. Then he wiped the bar — the long wooden surface that had been polished by forty years of elbows and bar towels and the occasional spilled drink — from one end to the other, slowly, methodically, the way a priest might clean an altar if the priest had a mortgage and two kids in college and a lower back that ached when it rained.

The first customer came at 6:30. A trucker. Gray jacket, gray cap, gray face. He sat at the far end of the bar, ordered black coffee, and drank it in four sips over twelve minutes. He paid with exact change and left a two-dollar tip on a twelve-dollar tab. Bill did not ask where he was going. He did not ask where he had been. The trucker was not a person. He was a force of nature — like wind or rain or the occasional ice storm that knocked out the power for three days and made the whole town feel like it was ending.

Bill refilled the coffee. The trucker nodded. Bill nodded back. The trucker left. The buzz of the neon sign filled the silence.

By ten in the morning, the regulars had arrived. Tommy — thirty-something, worked at Walmart, wore a blue vest even on his days off because his mother had raised him better than to show up looking like trash — sat at his usual spot and ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and talked about things he had read on the internet.

"Did you know that they found water on Mars?" Tommy said.

"I've heard that," Bill said.

"They think there might be little creatures down there. In the water."

"Maybe," Bill said.

"If there are creatures down there, and we go down there, and we meet them — what do we say?"

Bill thought about this. He thought about Tommy's question — what do we say to creatures from Mars? — and he thought about the fact that Tommy was thirty years old and worked at Walmart and had never been anywhere in Oklahoma more than two hours from home, and he thought that maybe the most honest answer was also the simplest.

"I think we'd say 'hello,'" Bill said.

Tommy considered this. "Yeah. I guess we would."

They drank in silence for a while. The buzz of the neon sign filled the space between words.

Marge crossed the street at noon. She worked at the diner — the Yellow Whistle, two buildings down from The Last Call — and she came over at lunch every day except Sunday, when she slept until nine and then went to church. She and Bill ate grilled cheese in silence, sitting at a corner table that had been scratched by a thousand knives and stained by a thousand spills.

"How's your back?" Marge asked.

"Same," Bill said.

"Same," she said.

They ate. The grilled cheese was good — thick bread, real cheese, cooked until it was brown and crispy on the outside and melted and hot on the inside. It was the best thing Bill made all day. It was probably the best thing he made all week. He ate it slowly, savoring each bite, and thought about how good it was and how simple it was and how nobody ever thanked him for it and how he would make it again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that until he was too old to stand behind the bar and the cheese stopped being good or he stopped being able to taste it or both.

Old Roy came in at two. He was seventy-three, which made him the oldest man in town, and he spent most of his days sitting at the corner table with the other old men — Tommy was not an old man, but Old Roy treated everyone over forty as a member of the geriatric population — and talking about the old days.

"When I was a boy," Old Roy said every day, "this town had a factory. The Ford factory. They made parts for trucks. Five hundred workers. My daddy worked there. My uncle worked there. I worked there from eighteen to sixty-two. We made good money. We bought houses. We sent our kids to college. We had plans."

"Do you still have the plans?" Tommy asked. This was a running joke. Tommy asked this every time Old Roy talked about the factory, and Old Roy always gave the same answer.

"No, son. I threw them away."

"Why?"

"Because they didn't work."

The other men at the corner table nodded. They had all worked at the factory, or known someone who had, or heard about it from their fathers, who had heard about it from theirs. The factory was a story that every man in this town knew — a story about a time when things worked and plans worked and the future was something you could draw on a piece of paper and it would look like the present, just bigger and better and with more cars.

Bill washed glasses. The buzz of the neon sign filled the space between Old Roy's stories and Tommy's questions and Marge's silence and his own nothing.

The phone rang at seven. It was his son.

"Hey Dad, how are you?"

"Fine. You?"

"Yeah, I'm good. Listen — I was thinking, maybe I'll come visit sometime this fall."

"Yeah? That'd be nice."

"Yeah. I'll call you."

"Okay."

"Love you."

"Love you too."

He hung up the phone. He stood behind the bar for a minute, listening to the buzz of the neon sign, and he thought about his son coming to visit in the fall. He thought about what they would talk about. Probably nothing. Probably baseball, or the weather, or whether the grilled cheese was still good. He would show him the bar. He would show him the neon sign. He would say, "This is where I work," and his son would say, "Cool," and they would stand in silence and the buzz would fill the space between words.

The storm came at midnight.

It was not a big storm. It was not a tornado or a hurricane or anything that made the television news. It was a thunderstorm — the kind that comes through Oklahoma a few times every summer, brings an hour of rain and lightning and wind, and then moves on, leaving behind wet pavement and a sky that is cleaner than it was before.

But this one knocked out the power. All at once. The lights went off. The buzz of the neon sign stopped. The refrigerator behind the bar stopped humming. The whole world went quiet except for the rain and the thunder and the sound of men sitting in the dark and wondering what was happening.

Bill lit candles. Three of them — white tapers that Marge had given him for Christmas last year and he had never used because he did not like the idea of candles in a bar, which is not a place associated with elegance, and now here they were, three candles flickering on the bar, casting a warm, wavering light over the bottles and the glasses and the four men who were sitting in the glow like characters in a painting.

Marge came in from the diner. She had been locked in when the power went out — the electric door lock would not open — and she had climbed through the kitchen window, which was how she got covered in rain and mud and a little bit of dish soap, and she came into The Last Call looking like someone had tried to drown her in a restaurant kitchen and failed.

"Mind if I stay?" she asked.

"Stay as long as you want," Bill said.

She sat at the corner table. Old Roy told a story about a girl he knew in 1962 — a girl named Susan who had hair the color of wheat and a laugh that sounded like a bell and who had moved to California and become an actress and then gone back to Oklahoma and become a librarian and died of cancer in 2003. Nobody listened very carefully. Nobody did not listen. They sat in the candlelight and the rain fell and the thunder rolled and the story was neither important nor unimportant but existed in the space between those two categories, where most stories live.

Tommy talked about his daughter, who had asthma and needed an inhaler and was six years old and already knew more about the world than Tommy knew at thirty. Marge talked about her sister in Tulsa, who had cancer and was getting treatment and might be okay and might not. Bill listened and said nothing and the candles flickered and the rain fell and for one hour, maybe two, The Last Call was the most beautiful place in the world.

Then the power came back on.

The lights flickered and then blazed. The refrigerator hummed. The neon sign buzzed. The spell broke. Nobody said anything. Nobody had words for what had happened in the dark. The darkness had held something that the light could not contain.

Old Roy went home. Tommy went home. Marge went back across the street to the Yellow Whistle. Bill stood alone behind the bar in the bright light and the buzzing sign and the smell of stale beer and fried food and the emptiness of a room that had been beautiful for two hours and was no longer beautiful and never would be again.

He locked up at eleven. He walked to his truck in the parking lot. The sky was full of stars. This was Oklahoma, and there was no light pollution out here, and when the clouds parted, you could see the Milky Way stretching across the sky like a river of diamonds poured by someone who did not care whether anyone noticed.

Bill got in his truck. He drove home. He slept. He woke up. He opened The Last Call at six. He flipped on the lights. The neon sign buzzed.

He wiped the bar.