I.

The beer was cold and tasted like it had been stored next to something else that used to taste like something. This was Yanktonton, Ohio, population declining, and the beer was whatever was cheapest at the Kwik Trip on Route 6. I drank it standing up in my trailer, looking out at the parking lot where the snow had turned to grey slush and the slush had turned to ice and the ice had stayed there since February because nobody bothered to salt the roads anymore.

My name is Wayne. Kowalski. I am forty-five years old. I used to weld steel in a plant that made automotive parts for a company that doesn't exist anymore. The plant closed in 2001. My son sees his mother twice a year. I have a TV that shows baseball games that nobody watches and sports talk shows that argue about things that don't matter.

I went to the thrift store on Adams Street because it was raining and the Kwik Trip didn't have anything interesting behind the counter. The thrift store was closing—owner was moving to Florida, or somewhere warm, where things presumably worked the way things used to.

On a shelf near the door, there was a book with a worn cover. Fifty cents. I paid. The title was *And My Cat Went with Me*. The author was a woman named June Mercer. She had travelled through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia. She had written guidebooks for people who wanted to see the world on fifty dollars a week. She died in 2000 of breast cancer, alone, with no family.

II.

That night, she appeared.

She was not beautiful. She was wearing a pilled sweater, jeans with a hole in the knee, and sneakers that had been resoled twice. Her hair was pulled back in a clip that had lost its spring. She looked like every woman I had ever seen who was having a bad time.

Because she was.

"I'm June," she said. She was sitting on the plastic chair by my stove, the kind you get free when you open a checking account. "I think I'm dead. But I'm not worried about it. I was never very good at worrying."

She had two cats with her—a white one with a missing ear and a black one with a bad leg. They walked around the trailer like they'd been here before, which, I supposed, they had. In a way.

"I was going to Ukraine," she said. "I remember that much. I was in Kyiv, or somewhere near it, and then I was here. Wherever here is."

"Yanktonton, Ohio."

"That sounds like a place where things go to stop moving."

She was right.

June stayed. She sat in my trailer and drank cheap beer she couldn't taste and watched baseball games she didn't understand and talked about the places she'd been. Not Paris or Tokyo—those weren't her destinations. She talked about Bucharest bus stations and Tashkent markets and Sofia apartment blocks where old women sat in doorways and watched the world go by.

"They're all just people," she said one night, watching a game neither team was winning. "Rich or poor, Paris or—" she paused, searching for a word that wasn't Yanktonton, "—here. They're all just trying to get through the day without feeling completely alone."

"I'm pretty good at that," I said.

She looked at me. Not through me—actually looked. "You don't seem that good at it."

III.

She began to fade in March.

I noticed it when she reached for my beer and I could see the kitchen table through her hand. Just for a second. Then it was solid again.

"The pages," I said. I was reading the book. "I open it to a certain page, you're here. I close it, you start—" I gestured, not knowing how to describe it.

"Starting to what?"

"To... not be here."

She didn't panic. June was never good at panic. "How many pages are left?"

I counted. "Forty-seven."

"That's a lot of evenings."

It wasn't. By the time I'd read twenty pages, she was transparent enough that I could read the sports section through her shoulder. By page thirty, she was a voice without a body. By page forty-three, she was a voice that sounded like it was coming from the next room.

"June," I said.

"I'm here."

"Don't go."

"I'm not going anywhere." But she was. The pages were running out. The book was finite. She was bound to the words, and the words were running out, the way everything does.

On the last page, she was barely there. A whisper. A smell of cheap beer and old paper.

"Thank you for reading," she said.

Then she wasn't there.

IV.

I went back to the Kwik Trip. The beer was cold and tasted like it had been stored next to something else that used to taste like something.

I went home. I watched the baseball game. I drank the beer. I slept.

The next day was the same. The day after that was the same. Yanktonton doesn't change. Nothing in Yanktonton changes.

But one evening, about two weeks later, I took the book outside and set it on the windowsill. The rain was falling. The slush was ice. The world was exactly what it had always been.

I went inside. I poured a beer. I sat down.

And on the windowsill, in the rain, the book sat open to the last page, where June had written: "If you are reading this, I am alive. If I am alive, we are not alone."

I didn't move it.

I just sat there, drinking beer in a trailer in Yanktonton, Ohio, with the book open on the windowsill and the sound of rain on the roof and the feeling, just for a moment, that maybe the road goes somewhere after all.