The apartment smelled like stale beer and fried food and the kind of dust that settles when nobody opens the windows. Sharon Hendershot stood in the doorway of the kitchen and looked at Dale, who was sitting at the table typing on a machine he had borrowed from the pawnshop on Main Street.

"You're gonna break that thing," she said.

Dale didn't look up. "It's fine."

"It's got missing letters. I saw you hit the E key three times on that last line."

"It types."

"That's not the same thing as working."

Dale stopped typing and looked at her. His face was the color of old bread, tired and a little puffy around the eyes. He had been like this since the factory closed, since the thirty years he spent on the line had turned into thirty years of nothing.

"Sharon, go to bed."

She didn't go to bed. She walked to the table and looked at what he was typing. It was a letter, or something like a letter, full of words that didn't quite make sense when put together. Words like opportunities and connections and people who owed favors.

"What are you writing?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"Let me see it."

He reached for the page, but Sharon was faster. She pulled it from the typewriter and held it up to the single bulb that hung from the ceiling, the one that flickered when the wind blew from the west.

The words were barely legible, typed with uneven pressure, some letters dark and clear, others faint or missing entirely. But Sharon could read. She had read the daily paper every morning for twelve years, and she could read this.

Becky. The Star. Tonight. Nine.

She set the page down and looked at the ribbon. It was an old ribbon, dark and patchy, and it showed everything: which keys Dale hit hardest, which letters he used most, which words he typed and retyped until they were right.

She found the first scrap in the waste basket, a piece of paper folded small and forgotten:

S H E. W I L L. N O T. B E L I E V E.

She found a second in the roller's seam, pressed in by Dale's impatient fingers:

T O L D. H E R. A B O U T. T H E. M O N E Y.

Sharon picked up the scraps and held them in her palm. They were small, almost nothing, pieces of paper that contained the shape of whatever was happening in her husband's head.

"Dale," she said. "Who's Becky?"

He looked at her for a long time. The apartment was quiet except for the refrigerator humming and the sound of traffic on the highway, two miles away but loud enough to reach this far.

"Becky Lou," he said finally. "She works at the Star. She's--she's someone I talk to."

"Talk to."

"Talk to. At the bar. Sometimes."

Sharon sat down in the chair across from him. She was tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. This was the kind of tired that comes from living in a room with someone for twelve years and realizing you don't know what they're thinking.

"How long?" she asked.

"Since spring."

"Spring. That's eight months."

"Sharon, it's nothing."

"Is it sex?"

He didn't answer.

"Is it money?"

He didn't answer that either.

"Then what is it?"

Dale looked down at his hands, which were rough and stained from years of work that no longer existed. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know what it is."

Sharon picked up the scraps from the table and held them between her fingers. They were almost nothing. A folded piece of paper. A smudge of ink. A name typed too hard.

She thought about leaving. She thought about packing a bag and getting in her car and driving until the highway ran out, which wasn't far. She thought about calling her sister in Cleveland, who would tell her to go back, to make it work, to not make things worse.

Instead, she walked to the typewriter and removed the ribbon, cutting it from the spools with the scissors she kept in the desk drawer. She held the ribbon in her hand, dark and worn and full of other people's words, and then she dropped it in the trash.

"Tomorrow," she said, "I'm going to talk to Becky Lou."

Dale looked up. "You don't have to do that."

"Yes," Sharon said. "I do."

She went to bed. Dale kept typing until three in the morning, and the keys clacked in the dark like teeth chattering from cold.

The next evening, Sharon went to the Star, which was a bar on the edge of town, past the strip mall and the abandoned lot and the gas station that had closed in '09. She pushed through the door and found Becky Lou at the far end of the bar, drinking something from a bottle and looking at her phone.

Becky saw Sharon and put the phone down. She was thirty, maybe, with tired eyes and a mouth that had learned not to smile.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

Sharon sat down. "I'm Dale's wife."

Becky nodded. She didn't look surprised.

"I know," she said.

"I wanted to ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"Does he talk to you about me?"

Becky was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Sometimes."

"What does he say?"

"That he's tired. That he doesn't know what to do. That he feels like he's failing at everything." She paused. "That you deserve better."

Sharon felt something shift inside her, small and almost invisible, like a key turning in a lock.

"And what do you tell him?" she asked.

Becky looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. "I tell him the truth. Which isn't much."

Sharon sat there for a while, drinking a beer she didn't want, listening to the bar noise, the clink of glasses, the low murmur of people talking about nothing. When she finally stood up, Becky asked if she wanted the address.

"For what?"

"To talk to him. Together. If you want."

Sharon thought about it. Then she nodded. "Yeah," she said. "I do."

She walked home through the dark, the highway still loud, the apartment still smelling of stale beer and fried food and dust. Dale was asleep at the table, his head on the typewriter, the keys silent beneath his face.

Sharon went to bed alone and didn't sleep much.

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