Youngstown, Ohio, 2022

The vending machine in the gas station lobby ate Eleanor's dollar on a Tuesday and didn't give her anything back except a weird clicking sound that she couldn't decide was mechanical or personal. She stood there for a minute watching the Snickers bar sit halfway out of the coil, then gave up and went to the counter.

"Machine take your money again?" Jack asked. He was wiping the counter with a rag that had been white once.

"Twice today."

"Old thing. I've been meaning to fix it."

"You've been meaning to fix it since 2019."

Jack smiled the way people smile when they're not sure if they're supposed to be amused or offended. "I'll get to it."

Eleanor bought a bottle of water instead. She stood by the door and drank it while watching the parking lot. Two trucks idled at the pump, their drivers leaning against the cabs and smoking. A woman in a minivan was arguing with the pump, which had given her a "card error" message for the third time.

Arthur's truck was there too, parked in the back where the shadows were thickest. He wasn't in it. He was probably inside, buying cigarettes or lottery tickets or whatever it was truck drivers bought at gas stations at nine in the morning on a weekday.

She had known for three months that he was lying about his Wednesday schedule. She'd checked the dispatch log—she had access because she used to do scheduling before her back gave out and before the company let her go to part-time. Wednesday nights, there were no loads assigned to Arthur. No pickups, no drop-offs, nothing. Just an empty schedule and a husband who came home smelling like diesel and silence.

She hadn't confronted him. Partly because she didn't want to know the answer, and partly because confronting him would mean admitting that she was paying attention, and admitting that felt like losing.

Her first marriage had ended because Mark was seeing someone. She'd found the texts on his phone—a woman named Jessica, sending him pictures of her lunch, her dog, the sunset. Nothing explicit, nothing that would have given her grounds for anger in a court of law. Just the slow, cumulative evidence of a man who was giving his attention to someone else.

They'd tried counseling. They'd tried talking. They'd tried everything except the thing that would have actually worked, which was probably just paying attention to each other instead of looking for reasons to leave.

Arthur came in, buying a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. He nodded at Jack, nodded at her, and left. His movements were efficient, practiced—the movements of a man who had done this a thousand times and would do it a thousand more.

"Hey," Jack said, when Arthur was gone. "You want to ask me something?"

Eleanor looked at him. "Do I look like I want to ask you something?"

"You look like you're carrying something. It's sitting on your shoulders like a backpack full of rocks."

She thought about not asking. She thought about going home, sitting on her couch, watching the news, and letting the rocks sit there. But the vending machine had taken her dollar, and the minivan woman was still arguing with the pump, and Arthur was probably driving to wherever he was driving every Wednesday, and she was tired of carrying the backpack.

"Can you help me find out where he goes on Wednesday nights?" she asked.

Jack set down the rag and leaned against the counter. "Why?"

"Because I need to know."

"Knowing doesn't always help."

"I know."

Jack was quiet for a minute. Then he pulled out his phone and opened an app. "My ex-wife and I used this. Location sharing. I gave her access to my phone, she gave me access to hers. It's not creepy if both people agree to it."

"I'm not asking you to be creepy. I'm asking you to help me."

Jack looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, "Give me Arthur's phone. Just for a minute."

She didn't have Arthur's phone. But she had his old one—the one he'd replaced when his screen cracked and he'd said he was going to fix it and never did. She went home and got it from the drawer where she kept it, along with old cables and dead batteries and things she hadn't thrown away because throwing them away felt like admitting they were useless.

She brought the phone to Jack the next morning. He plugged it into his laptop, typed some commands, and came back ten minutes later with a expression that was somewhere between sympathy and annoyance.

"It's done," he said. "His phone is now sharing location with your phone. You'll see a dot on a map. It updates every few minutes. If he turns off location sharing, you'll get a notification. If he takes the battery out, you'll get a notification. If he smashes the phone with a hammer, you'll probably get a notification, though I can't guarantee the notification system will survive the hammer."

Eleanor took the phone. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet."

The first Wednesday, she watched the dot from her desk at the gas station. Arthur left at six forty-five, driving his truck east on Route 45. The dot moved steadily, following the road, passing the exit for the abandoned steel mill, the closed AutoZone, the strip mall where three of the ten stores were empty.

He crossed into Brooklyn—which in Ohio was a neighborhood, not a city—and stopped at an address on a street Eleanor didn't recognize. The dot stayed there. It didn't move. It just sat, a small green circle on a blue map, like a flag planted on territory no one had bothered to claim.

She watched it for two hours. Then she went back to pumping gas.

The second Wednesday, she watched the same thing happen. Arthur left at six forty-five. The dot moved east, passed the steel mill, crossed into Brooklyn, stopped at the same address. Two hours. Then it moved again, heading back.

She printed a map. She drew a circle around the address. She looked at the circle and thought about how small it was on the page—just a dot, really, no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence—and how much of her husband's life was happening inside that dot.

The third Wednesday, she didn't watch from the gas station. She drove.

She took her car, which had a dent in the passenger door from a parking lot incident she couldn't remember and a radio that only picked up one station that played country music from the nineties, and she drove east on Route 45.

The neighborhood was the kind of neighborhood that had once been middle class and was now just class. Row houses with peeling paint. Front yards with grass that was more weed than lawn. Cars parked on the street that hadn't moved in a while.

The address was a two-story house, number 4B, with a porch that had one step that sagged and a door that was painted a color Eleanor couldn't name. A woman was sitting on the porch in a chair, watching a television that was turned on but too quiet to hear.

Eleanor parked across the street and sat in her car and watched.

Arthur got out of his truck. He walked up the steps, rang the bell, and the door opened. The woman on the porch stood up and came to the door—no, not a woman, an old woman, and she wasn't a neighbor, she was—

Eleanor got out of the car. She walked across the street, her feet making sounds on the cracked sidewalk that she couldn't tell if they were loud or quiet. She climbed the steps. Arthur was standing in the doorway, and the old woman was behind him, and Eleanor felt the backpack of rocks settle onto her shoulders with the weight of something she should have known and didn't.

"Hi, Eleanor," Arthur said. His voice was the same as always—flat, neutral, the voice of a man who had learned to speak in a way that didn't give anything away.

"Hi," Eleanor said.

The old woman was looking at her with eyes that were cloudy but not unkind. "You must be Eleanor," she said. Her voice was thin, the voice of someone who used it infrequently. "I'm Margaret. Arthur's mother."

Eleanor nodded. She didn't know what to say. She had rehearsed a dozen conversations in her head, each one more confrontational than the last. None of them involved an old woman named Margaret who looked at her like she was a guest in her own living room.

"Come in," Arthur said.

The apartment was small—one bedroom, one bathroom, a living room with a couch and a chair and a television that was playing a weather forecast. There were no photographs on the walls. No personal items except for a box of medications on the coffee table and a pile of mail on the counter.

Margaret sat back down in her chair. Arthur sat on the couch. Eleanor stood in the middle of the room, feeling like she was intruding on something that wasn't hers to intrude on.

"How long?" Eleanor asked.

"Two years," Arthur said. "Since Dad died. She couldn't stay in the house alone. The Alzheimer's—it's early stages, but it's progressing. She needs someone to check on her. To make sure she takes her medication. To—"

"Your company doesn't allow family leave?"

Arthur looked at the floor. "If I take leave, it shows up on my record. The insurance—her medication costs about four hundred dollars a month. The insurance covers it. If I lose the insurance, I can't afford the medication."

Eleanor nodded. She understood. She understood the way a person understands a math problem they've seen before—the numbers are different, but the structure is the same. Money, time, love, sacrifice, the way they add up and don't add up and sometimes subtract in ways that leave you with less than you started with.

"Does she know you come every Wednesday?" Eleanor asked.

Arthur looked at Margaret, who was watching the weather forecast with the intensity of someone for whom the weather was the most interesting thing that happened all day. "Some days yes. Some days no. Today she knows."

Margaret turned to Arthur. "You brought the bread," she said.

"Yes, Mother. I brought the bread."

Eleanor stood in the middle of the room and felt the backpack of rocks shift on her shoulders, not lighter, not heavier, just different. She thought about Mark. She thought about the texts she'd found on his phone. She thought about how she'd spent three months looking for evidence of his betrayal instead of asking him why he was giving his attention to someone else.

She thought about Arthur, driving to this apartment every Wednesday, leaving his wife alone in a gas station in Youngstown, Ohio, because his mother needed him and the insurance was worth more than the truth.

"I should go," she said.

Arthur stood up. "Eleanor—"

"No. It's fine."

She walked back across the cracked sidewalk, across the street, to her car. She got in, started the engine, and sat there for a minute, listening to the radio station that played country music from the nineties. Then she drove home.

Arthur texted her that night. "Not coming home Wednesday. Same as usual."

Eleanor looked at the text on her phone. She thought about lying. She thought about telling him she knew. She thought about the vending machine that had taken her dollar and given her nothing back.

She typed: "Okay."

She sent it. She put the phone down. She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of milk that was two days past its expiration date and poured herself a glass and drank it standing up, because that's the kind of night it was.

Jack was at the gas station the next morning, wiping the counter with the rag that had been white once.

"Did you do it?" Eleanor asked.

"Did you what?"

"Ask."

He looked at her. "Did you find out what you wanted to know?"

Eleanor thought about the apartment on the street she couldn't name. About the old woman watching the weather forecast. About her husband sitting on a couch in a small room, holding his life together one Wednesday at a time.

"Yeah," she said. "I found out."

"Good."

She went back to pumping gas. The vending machine ate another dollar. She didn't go to check on the Snickers bar. She just kept working, the way people do, the way you do when the rocks on your shoulders are heavy but not heavy enough to make you stop walking.

Outside, the sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel—gray, flat, the kind of gray that makes you think about nothing in particular and everything all at once. A truck idled at the pump. A woman in a minivan argued with the pump. Life, in Youngstown, Ohio, went on the way it always went on: rough, repetitive, and indifferent to whether anyone was keeping score.

--- OTMES-v2-COA-09-3F7B4D-E0500-M0-T014-1E8A E_total: 5.00 | Dominant Mode: 0 (Dirty Realism / Nihilistic) TI: 0.50 | Direction: 270° (Nihilistic)