I.

The can was empty. Ruby knew this because she had drunk from it, and now it was empty. She held it in her hand and felt the weight of it—light, hollow, the way everything felt when it was done being useful.

She stood in the kitchen of the trailer on Sycamore Street and looked at the row of cans on the counter. Seven of them. Seven empty things that had once held something. Soda. Beer. Soup. Coffee. Things that went in and things that came out and things that were left behind.

Her grandmother was on the couch. She had been on the couch for two days. She slept most of the time and watched soap operas the rest of the time. Sometimes she talked to people who were not in the room. Ruby had learned not to be surprised by this.

Ruby put the can on the counter next to the others. Then she went to the sink and filled a pot with water and put it on the stove and turned the burner on. Oatmeal for breakfast. It was what they had. It was always what they had.

The cat came into the kitchen and rubbed against Ruby's leg. The cat was missing part of its tail and had one eye that did not work. Ruby named it Tuesday because she found it on a Tuesday and she could not remember anything before Tuesday.

She poured oatmeal into a bowl and set it in front of the cat and sat down at the table and waited for the water to boil.

At nine o'clock, a woman in a dark jacket drove up in a silver Honda. She got out and walked to the trailer and knocked on the door. Ruby opened it before she could knock again.

"Are you Ruby Hayes?" the woman asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm Debbie. Can I come in?"

Ruby looked at her grandmother on the couch. She looked at the kitchen. She looked back at Debbie.

"It's not much."

"It doesn't need to be."

Ruby stepped aside. Debbie walked in, looking around with the careful, interested expression of someone who was seeing something for the first time and knew she was supposed to be moved by it.

"Can I ask you a few questions?" Debbie said.

Ruby sat down. Debbie sat down opposite her. Debbie had a notebook and a pen. She did not write anything down yet. She was waiting.

"Have you lived here long?" Debbie asked.

"Since September."

"And before that?"

"My other grandma's house. She lives in the other trailer."

"Your other grandma?"

"My mom's mom. My other mom's mom. It's complicated."

Debbie nodded. She wrote something down. "And your parents—"

"Gone."

"Gone how?"

"Dead. Or not dead. I don't know. I know they're not here."

Debbie put the pen down. "Ruby, I make a television programme. It's about people's lives. Real lives. Would you let me film you for a little bit? Just a few minutes."

Ruby looked at her. "What do you want to film?"

"Nothing special. Just... you. What you do. How you live."

Ruby thought about this. She thought about the empty cans on the counter. She thought about the oatmeal cooling in the bowl. She thought about how long it had been since anyone had looked at her and not looked away.

"How much?" she asked.

Debbie blinked. "How much what?"

"For letting you film me. How much do you pay?"

"Ah. Fifty dollars."

Ruby considered. Fifty dollars was a lot of money. It was enough to buy groceries for a week. It was enough to buy the cat food that did not make it vomit. It was enough to buy a new pencil because she had lost the last one.

"Okay," she said.

II.

Ray Kowalski sat in his recliner in front of the television and watched a football game that he was not really watching. The volume was low. The game was on a TV from 1998 with a picture that looked like it had been taken through dirty glass. Ray did not care. The sound was something to have in the background while he drank his beer and thought about nothing.

He had been unemployed for three years. The steel plant closed in November of 2021, and after that, there were other plants that closed too, one after another, like dominoes falling in a line that started long before Ray was born and would continue long after he was gone.

He collected disability now. A hundred and eighty dollars a month. He had a pension from the plant, but it had been cut in half during the last contract dispute, and half of nothing was still nothing.

He lived in a trailer that he owned outright, which was the one thing he had going for him. The trailer was old—the roof leaked when it rained hard, the pipes groaned at night, the floor in the kitchen sloped toward the door like it was trying to escape—but it was his.

Debbie came to the trailer park on a Wednesday. She walked through the rows of trailers and mobile homes, looking for someone. She found Ray because he was the only man sitting outside on a Wednesday afternoon. Most of the men his age were inside, watching television or sleeping or doing whatever it was that men did when they had nowhere else to be.

"Are you Ray Kowalski?" she asked.

Ray looked at her. "Depends on who's asking."

"I'm Debbie. I make a television programme."

Ray took a sip of his beer. "I don't do television."

"This isn't television yet. It's... footage. We're collecting footage. For a documentary. About life in Youngstown. About what it's like to live here now."

Ray shrugged. "It's like living."

Debbie sat down on the steps of his trailer. She was not supposed to do this—producers were not supposed to sit on the steps of strangers' trailers—but she had been doing this job for six years and she had learned that the best footage came from the moments that were not planned.

"Would you let me film you?" she asked. "Just for a little bit. Cooking something. Fixing something. Whatever you do."

Ray looked at her. He looked at the beer in his hand. He looked at the football game on his television, which he was still not watching.

"How much?" he asked.

Debbie had expected this. "Two hundred dollars."

Ray thought about it. Two hundred dollars was enough to fix the leak in the roof. It was enough to buy new tires for his truck, which was parked behind the trailer and had not been driven in four months because the tires were bald. It was enough to do something that was not nothing.

"Okay," he said.

III.

Debbie brought Ruby to Ray's trailer on the first day of filming. She had told them both that they would be filming a cooking segment—a father and daughter making a meal together. Neither of them had asked who the other was or why they were together. They had both learned, in different ways, that questions were a waste of time.

Ray made eggs. He cracked them into a pan with one hand, the way he had been cracking them for thirty years, before the plant closed and after. The eggs were slightly burnt around the edges, which was how he liked them.

Ruby sat at the table and watched him. She did not offer to help. She did not say anything. She just watched.

When Ray put the plate in front of her, she picked up her fork and ate.

Debbie filmed it all. She filmed Ray cracking the eggs. She filmed Ruby eating. She filmed the cat walking across the kitchen floor and jumping onto the table and sitting next to Ruby's plate, watching.

"Can I ask you something?" Debbie said, pausing the camera.

Ruby looked up from her plate. "Yeah."

"Have you cooked before?"

Ruby shook her head. "No. I usually cook for myself. But I can fix things. My toaster was broken and I fixed it. I used a screwdriver and a paperclip."

Debbie smiled. "That's impressive."

"It's not impressive. It's just... a toaster."

Debbie filmed the next day. And the next. Each time, the process was the same. Debbie would arrive, set up the camera, and ask Ray to do something—cook, fix, clean. Ray would do it. Ruby would watch or help or not. Debbie would ask a few questions. Ruby would give short answers.

"Where did you learn to fix things?" Debbie asked on the fourth day.

"My dad," Ruby said.

"Where is your dad?"

Ruby put down the screwdriver she was holding. "I don't know."

"Do you want to know?"

Ruby thought about this. "No."

Debbie did not write anything down.

On the fifth day, Ray and Ruby fixed the vending machine in the common area of the trailer park. It had been broken for months, dispensing nothing but frustration to anyone who put quarters into it. Ray figured out the problem—a jammed coil in the snack compartment. Ruby reached inside and dislodged the stuck bag of chips. The machine groaned, shuddered, and dispensed two cans of Coke.

Ray took one. Ruby took one. They sat on the steps of the common building and drank the Coke in silence.

Debbie filmed this too.

"Why did you fix it?" she asked afterward.

Ray looked at her. "It was broken."

"But fixing it doesn't help you. The machine is owned by the park. The Coke costs a dollar. You didn't have a dollar."

Ray looked at the can in his hand. He looked at Ruby, who was drinking hers slowly, carefully, savoring the carbonation.

"No," Ray said. "It doesn't help me."

"Then why?"

Ray set the can down. "I don't know."

Debbie looked at him. She looked at Ruby. She looked at the vending machine, which was now working, dispensing nothing to anyone, but working anyway.

"Good," she said. "That's a good answer."

IV.

The filming ended on the seventh day. Debbie gave Ray two hundred dollars and Ruby fifty dollars. Ray put his in an envelope and wrote the date on the front and put the envelope in the back of his dresser drawer, next to other envelopes that contained other dates and other amounts of money that had come from doing things that did not help him.

Ruby put her fifty dollars on the kitchen table, next to the half-empty bottle of pills that her grandmother had been taking and the cat food that was running low. She did not put it in a drawer. She did not hide it. She just left it there, on the table, where it would be seen when her grandmother woke up and needed to buy something.

Debbie packed up her equipment and drove away. She did not look back. She had forty hours of footage—Ray cooking, Ruby watching, a broken vending machine fixed for no reason, two people who did not know each other sitting in a kitchen in Youngstown, Ohio, on a Tuesday in June, doing nothing that would make a good television programme.

She put the footage on a hard drive and labeled it YOUNGSTOWN DOC and put the hard drive in a drawer in her apartment in Cleveland, where it joined a dozen other hard drives containing a dozen other lives that would probably never be seen.

Ray went to the bar on Friday and drank for three days. On the fourth day, he went to the post office and deposited the two hundred dollars into his savings account, where it joined the other two hundred dollars and the other two hundred dollars and the other two hundred dollars that he had been depositing since the plant closed, one envelope at a time, one date at a time, one nothing at a time.

Ruby went back to her grandmother's trailer. Her grandmother was on the couch, as usual. The cat was on the floor, as usual. The television was on, as usual.

Ruby went to the kitchen and opened the cupboard and took out the empty cans. One by one, she picked them up and pressed them flat. The metal groaned under her hands, then surrendered, collapsing into a small, dense disc that she placed on the floor beside the others.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

She picked up another can. She pressed. It groaned. It surrendered. She placed it on the floor.

The television talked. The cat slept. Her grandmother breathed. Ruby pressed another can flat.

OTMES v2: DIR-2024-OH-VOID-4ACT-1260W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM