Tom's back hurt. That was the first thing he noticed when he woke up and the second thing he noticed was that he was late for a job he no longer had.

The steel plant closed in March. March of this year. It had been closed for four months, three weeks, and six days, but Tom still woke up at five in the morning, reached for the bottle on the nightstand, and thought about the shift.

Kelly came on Thursdays. She always came on Thursdays. She would knock at seven, let herself in with the key he had given her three years ago when they stopped fighting about whether he should give it to her, make coffee in the percolator that smelled like burnt earth no matter how many times she cleaned it, and look around the apartment with the expression she had perfected over sixteen years of this routine. It was not disapproval. It was something worse than disapproval. It was acceptance.

"The landlord called me," she said, setting the percolator on the hot plate.

"I know."

"You're two months behind."

"I know."

She stood in the kitchen and held the counter with both hands and looked at the wall. The wall had a crack in it that Tom had been meaning to fix for two years. The crack had gotten bigger. It was a small thing, a hairline fracture running from the corner of the ceiling to the top of the doorframe, but it was the kind of thing that made you feel like the whole building was slowly collapsing, which maybe it was.

"What are you going to do?" Kelly asked.

"I don't know."

"You could get a job."

"I'm fifty-two, Kelly. Who's going to hire me?"

She didn't answer. She knew who was going to hire him. Nobody. She had applied to places on his behalf. She had called numbers in the phone book. She had walked into stores and asked managers if they needed help. The answers were always the same: We'll call you. They never did.

Tom got out of bed and sat on the edge of the mattress and put his feet on the floor and waited for the pain in his back to settle into its usual rhythm. It was a good rhythm. Predictable. You could plan around back pain. You could build a life around it. Wake up, hurt. Eat, hurt. Watch TV, hurt. Sleep, hurt more.

He went to the thrift store on Elyria Avenue on a Saturday because there was nothing else to do and the thrift store was warm and the people who worked there didn't ask questions. He was browsing the furniture section—a collection of chairs and tables and lamps that people had donated because they were tired of them—when he saw the loom.

It was an old hand loom, wooden, maybe from the early twentieth century, with rusted parts and missing pieces and a general air of having been abandoned and forgotten. But the frame was solid. The beams were straight. The mechanism, though corroded, was complete.

"How much?" he asked the girl behind the counter. She looked like she was nineteen and didn't want to be nineteen.

"Fifty bucks."

"Fifty?"

"She donated it. Said her grandfather used it. I think it's junk. But fifty."

Tom paid. He could not figure out how he was going to get the loom home—he lived on the third floor, there was no elevator, the loom was bigger than the staircase turned at a right angle—but Kelly came on Thursday and saw the advertisement in his apartment (a loom, free, need to pick up) and said, "I'll help you," and came on Saturday with a friend from school named Derek who had a truck, and together they carried the loom up three flights of stairs and set it up in the corner of the living room where it took up almost all the space and made the room feel smaller.

Tom oiled the rusted parts with WD-40 from the hardware store. He replaced the broken heddles with wire he bent himself. He threaded the warp with cotton yarn from a bag at the grocery store. And on a Sunday afternoon, with Kelly watching from the couch and Derek eating a sandwich on the floor, Tom sat at the loom and began to weave.

It was harder than he expected. His hands blistered. His back screamed. The shuttle got stuck three times in the first hour. But by the end of the day, he had woven a strip of cloth about two feet long. It was not beautiful. It was not ugly. It was cloth—a simple plain weave in a natural colour, slightly uneven because his tension was inconsistent, but cloth. Real cloth, made by his hands on a machine he had fixed himself.

He wove for three weeks. Eight hours a day, five days a week. He stopped drinking in the mornings. He stopped watching TV. He sat at the loom and wove and his hands learned the rhythm and his back learned to tolerate it and the strip of cloth grew longer.

He listed it on eBay. "Handwoven cotton cloth, approximately two feet by eighteen inches. Made in Cleveland." It sold for twelve dollars plus shipping.

He wove more. He sold more. In a month, he had made eighty dollars. It was not enough to pay the rent. It was not enough to buy groceries. But it was something.

The stone appeared in late September. Tom had gone for a walk along the river—Cuyahoga, not Mississippi, though he had told everyone at the VA who asked that he had served near Vicksburg, which was true in the sense that he had served and Vicksburg had been a battle and he had never corrected the record because it was easier than explaining that his job had been driving a truck for supplies and he had never been closer to a battlefield than a parking lot in Topeka.

The stone was on the riverbank, half-buried in mud and dead leaves. It was about the size of a grapefruit, smooth and round, the colour of dark honey, with veins of white running through it like lightning frozen in amber. Tom picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. He turned it over in his hands. It was beautiful in the way that random things are beautiful—a thing that was never meant to be beautiful but is, anyway, like a face that is not conventionally attractive but is, somehow, memorable.

He took it home and put it on the windowsill above the sink where he could see it while he washed dishes. It caught the light in the afternoon and threw it back in small golden flashes, like a cat's eyes.

Donovan came on a Tuesday. He was a man in his forties with a suit that fit too well and a smile that did not. He worked out of a shop on Euclid Avenue that specialized in "miscellaneous minerals and curiosities," which was a polite way of saying he bought junk and sold it to tourists.

He walked into Tom's building, asked to see Tom O'Connor, and stood in the living room and looked at the stone on the windowsill and said, "Where did you get that?"

"River," Tom said.

"Which river?"

"The Cuyahoga."

Donovan's eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch. "The Cuyahoga. Interesting." He walked to the window and picked up the stone and held it to the light and turned it over and nodded. "How much do you want for it?"

"I don't know."

"Let me make you an offer. Five thousand dollars."

Tom stared at him. "Five thousand."

"For the stone. Cash. Today."

Tom had not seen five thousand dollars in cash in three years. He had not seen five thousand dollars of any kind in four months. "I'll think about it," he said.

Donovan nodded. "Think. But don't think too long. Deals like this don't wait."

He left. Tom stood in the living room and looked at the stone and thought about five thousand dollars. He could pay the rent. He could pay the back rent. He could buy groceries for a year. He could—

He couldn't. Because the thing about five thousand dollars from a man like Donovan is that it is never just five thousand dollars. It is five thousand dollars plus something. A favour. A condition. A catch. And Tom, who had spent fifty-two years learning where the catches were, knew that this stone had a catch.

He did not sell it.

Donovan came back a week later. "Four thousand," he said.

Tom said no.

Donovan came back two weeks later. "Three thousand."

Tom said no.

But he started wondering. What if Donovan was right? What if the stone was worth more? What if he was making a mistake? He took the stone to another shop—a mineral dealer in downtown Cleveland who had a lab and equipment and people with PhDs who could tell you the chemical composition of a rock by looking at it.

The guy in the lab looked at the stone under a microscope and tapped it with a hard pointer and ran a quick spectral analysis and came out and said, "It's a river stone. Mississippi river stone, probably. Sedimentary conglomerate. The pattern is unusual—nice veining—but it's not rare. Not even close. I'd say it's worth maybe fifty dollars to a collector who likes the colour."

Fifty dollars. Donovan had offered five thousand.

Tom took the stone home and put it back on the windowsill and thought about it for a while. Then he made a decision. He would take it to seven different dealers. If all seven said it was worth fifty dollars, he would believe them. If even one of them said it was worth more, he would reconsider.

Dealer one: "Fifty dollars, maybe a hundred if someone really likes the pattern." Dealer two: "Nice stone. Worth about seventy-five to the right person." Dealer three: "I'll give you two hundred." Dealer four: "This is a special piece. I'd say five hundred minimum." Dealer five: "Where did you get this? The veining is incredible. I'll give you a thousand." Dealer six: "A thousand is generous. I'd say five hundred." Dealer seven: "It's a river stone. Fifty bucks. Don't waste my time."

Tom sat in his apartment that night and looked at the numbers he had written on a piece of paper: fifty, seventy-five, two hundred, five hundred, one thousand, five hundred, fifty. The average was three hundred and fifty-seven dollars. The median was seventy-five. The highest offer was one thousand.

Donovan's offer had been five thousand.

Tom felt something shift inside him. Not anger. Not betrayal. Just—disappointment. The kind of disappointment you feel when you realize that people have been treating you like an idiot and you let them.

He took the stone to the Cuyahoga the next morning and threw it in the river. It sank immediately, without a splash, without a sound, like a thing that was never meant to be seen.

The loom stopped a week later. The bearing seized—Tom could feel it resisting, the shuttle sticking, the rhythm breaking. He oiled it. He tightened the screws. He tried everything. The bearing was shot. The loom was done.

He took it to the dump on West 65th Street on a Thursday morning. It was heavier than he expected to carry, and his back hurt the whole way, and he set it down in front of the dumpster and watched the garbage truck come and lift it and drop it and heard the wood crack as it hit the bottom.

Kelly came on Thursday. She made coffee. She looked at the crack in the wall. It had gotten bigger.

"Dad," she said. "You should come live with me. Just until you get back on your feet."

Tom looked at her. He looked at the empty corner where the loom had been. He looked at the windowsill where the stone had been. He looked at the crack in the wall and the empty apartment and the percolator that smelled like burnt earth.

"Maybe," he said.

He did not go live with her. But he started looking for jobs. Real jobs. Not weaving. Not stones. Just work. Something to do during the day so he did not have to sit in the apartment and look at the crack in the wall.

He found a stocking job at a grocery store on West 25th. Eight hours a day, standing, lifting boxes of cereal and cans of soup, putting them on shelves. His back hurt the first week. It hurt the second week. By the third week, it hurt less.

On his first Tuesday off, he sat in the apartment and watched TV. Kelly came over and made coffee. The percolator still smelled like burnt earth. The crack in the wall was still there. The sun came through the window at four o'clock and fell on the empty corner where the loom had been.

Tom turned up the volume on the TV. Kelly poured herself a cup of coffee. Outside, a truck drove past on the street. A dog barked. A siren wailed in the distance and then faded.

The apartment was quiet. Not peaceful. Just quiet.

Life, Tom thought, was not a story. It did not have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had mornings and afternoons and evenings and mornings again, and the only difference between one day and the next was whether your back hurt more or less.

He drank his coffee. It was bitter. It was hot. It was coffee.

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