I

Tom Riley drank beer out of the bottle because the fridge had stopped working three weeks ago and he hadn't told anyone. Not his ex-wife, not his daughter, not the guy at the bar who knew his name even though Tom didn't know his. The beer was warm and the bottle was sweaty and it was the best thing he had tasted in days.

The factory had closed on a Thursday. It was always a Thursday. His boss, a man named Peters who had worked the line beside him for twenty years, had come around at noon with a look on his face that said the word had already been said and there was nothing left to say. Three hundred and twelve men and women handed pink slips by five o'clock. The union rep cried in the parking lot. Nobody looked at him when he cried.

Tom's town is in Ohio. It used to make things—truck parts, mostly, heavy steel things that held engines to frames. Now it makes nothing. The main street has seventeen vacant storefronts and three churches and a Walmart that sells everything the factory used to make for cheaper. The population has dropped from twelve thousand to eight thousand since Tom was a boy. The kids who leave don't come back. The ones who stay drink.

Tom drinks too.

His divorce was final in March. His ex-wife, Linda, took the house and the dog and sixty percent of the 401K because Tom had missed three payments on the car and come home drunk twice and said the wrong thing at dinner one night and something inside her had snapped. She didn't yell. She just looked at him the way you look at a piece of furniture you've had for a long time and realized it's starting to fall apart.

His daughter, Sarah, lives with Linda in a town called Medina that might as well be on the moon. Tom sees her every other weekend. They go to McDonald's. He asks her how school is. She says fine. He asks if she wants anything. She says no. They sit in the car after they finish eating and neither of them says anything for a minute, and then Tom drives her back to her mother's house and watches from the parking lot until she goes inside.

II

The valley is behind the old quarry, past the railroad tracks that haven't carried a train in ten years. It's not a real valley. It's a dip in the land where the runoff collects and the weeds grow tall and the junk from the quarry—rusty machinery, broken concrete, the remains of equipment that once moved mountains—has been slowly consumed by vegetation.

Tom goes there to shoot rabbits. He's not very good at it. He has an old .22 rifle that his father left him, and he misses most of the time. But he likes sitting in the valley and watching the light change. The light is different there. The hills block the view of the town, and for a while you can pretend you're somewhere else.

He found the snake on a Tuesday in late September. It was under a piece of rusted rebar, and a dog—some neighbour's dog that had gotten loose again—was trying to catch it. The snake was green, or as green as a snake can be when it's covered in dust. It struck at the dog, and the dog barked and jumped back, but it kept coming, circling, looking for an opening.

Tom kicked the dog. Not hard, but enough. The dog yelped and ran. Tom lifted the rebar and found the snake curled in a ball. It was hurt—one of its vertebrae was broken, and it dragged its back half when he picked it up.

He didn't know why he did it. Maybe because he had kicked a dog his whole life, metaphorically, and here was a chance to do something else. He found some cloth in his truck and wrapped the snake's injury and set it down in a patch of clover where it would be safe.

"Live," he said. He didn't know who he was talking to.

He went home and drank a beer and went to bed.

III

The woman's name was Mary. Everybody called her Crazy Mary, though Tom didn't think she was crazy. He thought she was something else—something that had happened to her, something that had broken her in a way that made other people look away.

She lived in a cabin that was less a cabin and more a collection of boards held together by nails and stubbornness. It sat at the bottom of the valley, next to a stream that ran year-round even when everything else went dry. Around the cabin were patches of garden—messy, overgrown, full of things that grew wild: tomatoes, beans, sunflowers, weeds that Tom didn't recognize.

She was sitting outside on a chair made from a door laid across two milk crates, smoking a cigarette that she had rolled herself. She had grey hair that hung to her shoulders and a face that was more lines than features, but her eyes were sharp. Sharp and dark and they took in everything.

"You're the rabbit man," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Tom," he said.

"I know who you are." She took a drag. "Everyone in town knows who you are. You don't hide well."

Tom sat down on an upturned bucket. He didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

Mary smoked. A bird sang somewhere in the sunflowers. The stream ran. After a while, she spoke again.

"My husband died five years ago. Cancer. I was a teacher—high school English, twenty-two years—and after he died, I couldn't do it anymore. The kids looked at me like I was going to break, and maybe I was, but you don't show that. Not in front of two hundred teenagers. So I took early retirement. Or they gave it to me. Same thing."

She paused. The cigarette burned down to the filter.

"I started hearing things. Voices. Not real voices. Just... whispers. From the walls. From the trees. The doctor gave me pills. The pills made me feel like I was underwater. So I stopped taking them. I came here. I've been here five years."

Tom nodded. He didn't know what to do with this information. Did he offer sympathy? Did he leave? He sat on the bucket and drank his warm beer and listened to a woman he had just met tell him about her life.

"Come back tomorrow," she said. "If you want. I have beans. They're overcooked, but they're food."

He came back the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.

IV

They sat by the stream and drank beer and ate beans out of a pot that had been blackened by fire. Mary smoked. Tom watched the water. Sometimes they talked. Most of the time they didn't.

"It's nice," Tom said once.

"What's nice?"

"Nothing. Just—quiet."

Mary nodded. "Yeah. It's quiet here."

He learned things about her in the silence. She had been married to a man named James, who was a teacher too, at the middle school across town. They had met at a conference. He liked poetry—Keats, Frost, the kind of poetry that made you feel things you didn't know you had feelings for. When he died, she stopped reading poetry. She still had his books on a shelf in the cabin, though. Tom had seen them. A row of paperbacks with dog-eared pages and lines underlined in pencil.

She had a daughter, once. A girl named Claire, who was probably thirty now and lived in Seattle and called her mother once a year on Christmas and felt guilty about it and called her mother twice on Christmas and felt guilty about that too.

"She doesn't hate me," Mary said one evening, watching the sun go down behind the hills. The light was golden and warm and for a moment the valley looked almost beautiful. "She just can't be around me. I'm too much like a hole. You stand next to me and you feel yourself falling in."

Tom didn't have an answer for that. He took a drink of beer. The beans were cold and salty and they tasted like food.

"Your snake came back," Mary said.

"What snake?"

"The one you found under the rebar. It comes by sometimes. Sits on the porch and watches me. I think it knows you."

Tom looked at the stream. He thought about the snake, lying in the clover with its broken vertebrae, wondering if it had healed or died. He thought about how he had saved it and why he had saved it and whether it mattered.

"I'll look for it," he said.

V

Winter came early that year. The first snow fell on a Monday and covered the valley in white, and the cabin looked small and fragile beneath the weight of it, like a child's drawing of a house that someone had forgotten in the snow.

Tom sat inside the cabin on a chair that creaked when you moved. The cabin was cold—Mary wouldn't turn on the heat because "it costs too much and the wood is too expensive"—and they sat wrapped in blankets, drinking tea that Mary had made from herbs she had dried in the summer.

"It's going to get worse," Tom said. He was looking at the ceiling, where water stains spread like maps of countries that didn't exist. "This place. It's going to get worse."

"I know."

"You can't stay here all winter. The stream might freeze. The garden's dead. There's nothing—"

"I know." Mary's voice was calm. She was sitting on the bed, which was a mattress on the floor, and she was smoking a cigarette despite the cold, despite the fact that the smoke made her cough. "I know it's not much. I know it's not supposed to be like this."

"Then why—"

"Because this is where I am." She looked at him. Her eyes were sharp in the dim light. "You think I came here because I wanted to? I came here because there was nowhere else to go. Same as you."

Tom looked down at his hands. They were big hands, rough hands, the hands of a man who had spent forty-five years doing physical labour that nobody noticed until it stopped being done.

"I lost the factory," he said.

"I know."

"I lost Linda."

"I know."

"I lost—" He stopped. He didn't know what he had lost. Everything? Nothing? Just pieces, scattered like the junk in the quarry.

Mary reached across the space between them and took his hand. Her hand was small and cold and she held it tight.

"We're not supposed to be here," she said. "Neither of us. But we are. And for now, that has to be enough."

Outside, the wind blew across the valley and made a sound like a door closing. Inside, two people sat in the cold and held hands and drank bad tea and tried to be enough for each other for one more night.

It wasn't love. Not exactly. It wasn't friendship either. It was something simpler and more desperate—the recognition of another broken thing and the decision, for one more day, not to let it break completely.

Morning came. The snow kept falling. Tom got up and made coffee on the stove. Mary smoked on the bed. The snake was not on the porch.

Nothing was fixed. Nothing would be fixed. But the coffee was hot, and the snow was quiet, and for now, that was enough.