The factory closed on a Tuesday. It was a normal Tuesday, the kind of Tuesday that looks like every other Tuesday and doesn't tell you that something is about to change. The sirens went off at six in the morning like they always did, and the men walked through the gates like they always did, and by noon the doors were locked and the sign on the front said CLOSED in letters that had been painted over three times and still showed the ghosts of the words that had been underneath.

Tom Riley was forty-two years old and had worked at the factory for twenty-one. He knew the sound of every machine on the floor. He knew which ones needed to be hit with a wrench to keep running and which ones needed to be left alone. He knew the men who came in early and the men who came in late and the men who came in drunk. He knew all of this, and none of it mattered when the doors were locked.

He walked home that afternoon through a town that was already quieting down, as if it had received the news and was trying to pretend it hadn't heard it. The stores were closing. The diner was empty except for an old man at the counter who was drinking coffee and reading a newspaper from three days ago. Tom went home and sat in his kitchen and listened to his wife in the other room talking in a voice that was trying not to sound afraid.

The first month was the easiest. He collected unemployment, which was more money than he had ever had sitting in his bank account at any one time, and he told himself it would be fine. The economy was cyclical, he said. Factories reopened. Men got hired. This was how it worked.

The second month, the unemployment ran out. The third month, he started taking jobs that weren't at the factory.

The first job was at a warehouse on the edge of town, loading boxes onto trucks. It was hard work, harder than anything he had done at the factory, and the man who ran the warehouse was a young guy named Derek who was twenty-five and wore a stopwatch like it was a weapon. Tom lasted two weeks.

The second job was at a gas station off Route 6, pumping gas and wiping windshields and standing in front of a convenience store that sold things Tom didn't want to buy but needed money to buy. The pay was worse than the warehouse, and the hours were longer, and the man who owned the place charged him two dollars for a sandwich that the woman at the diner gave him for free.

He learned things in those jobs. He learned that the world outside the factory operated on rules that were different from the rules inside. Inside the factory, if you worked hard and showed up on time and didn't cause trouble, you were respected. Outside the factory, respect was a commodity that had to be earned in a different currency.

The currency was called thick skin, and Tom was learning to wear it.

He learned to stand in line at the welfare office and cut when nobody was looking. He learned to smile at the caseworker who treated him like he was stupid, even when she was right. He learned to laugh at the jokes of men who would have laughed at him if their positions were reversed.

He learned to tell his coworker at the gas station that he was stealing from the register, knowing that the coworker's son was in college and that the coworker's wife was sick, knowing that telling would get the coworker fired and that not telling would make Tom complicit. He told. He told because he needed the money for his sister's medicine, and he told because he had learned that in this world, the people who didn't tell were the people who ended up with nothing.

He told and the coworker was fired and Tom got the man's shift, and Tom stood at the register the next night, counting the cash, and he thought about the coworker's son in college and the coworker's wife in the hospital, and he thought about his own sister in the bed in the other room, and he thought about the sandwich at the gas station that cost two dollars, and he thought about the factory that had closed on a Tuesday, and he thought about the man who had painted over the CLOSED sign three times and could never quite get rid of the words underneath.

He went home and sat in his kitchen and listened to his wife in the other room talking on the phone in a voice that was trying not to sound afraid.

The nights were the worst. He worked the night shift at a convenience store on the edge of town now, which meant he stood behind a counter that sold cigarettes and lottery tickets and things people bought when they couldn't sleep. The fluorescent lights buzzed like insects trapped in a jar, and the parking lot outside was mostly empty except for the trucks that came and went at irregular hours and the cars that parked in the far corners and didn't move for a long time.

Tom watched the parking lot through the window above the counter. He watched the trucks and the cars and the people who came and went, and he thought about how the town had changed since the factory closed. It wasn't just the empty buildings and the closed stores. It was the way the men walked now, with their shoulders hunched and their eyes on the ground, like they were carrying something heavy that nobody else could see.

He thought about the book he had read once, long ago, before the factory and before the warehouse and before the gas station. It was a book about a man who believed in something—something big and important and worth fighting for. Tom couldn't remember the title. He couldn't remember the author. He could only remember the feeling he had had when he read it, which was the feeling of a man who believed that the world was fair and that hard work was rewarded and that if you just kept showing up and doing your best, eventually something would happen that would make it all worth it.

He couldn't remember the feeling anymore. That was the worst part. Not that he had stopped believing—in fact, he had stopped believing a long time ago—but that he couldn't remember what it had felt like to believe.

The night shift was almost over. The sky was getting light outside, a pale gray that was barely different from the dark. Tom locked the door and turned off the lights and walked out into the parking lot. The air was cold and smelled like diesel and wet asphalt. He walked to his car, a old sedan that had seen better days and probably would never see them again, and got in and started the engine.

He drove home slowly, watching the town pass by through the windshield. The closed stores. The empty buildings. The men walking to work with their shoulders hunched and their eyes on the ground. The woman at the diner who gave him free sandwiches even though she couldn't afford to. The old man at the counter reading a newspaper from three days ago.

He got home and went to bed and slept for three hours and woke up and went to work.

The factory would not reopen. He knew this the way he knew that the sun would rise and the fluorescent lights would buzz and the parking lot would fill with trucks and cars and people who couldn't sleep. It was not a belief. It was a fact, as solid and unchangeable as the CLOSED sign that had been painted over three times and still showed the ghosts of the words underneath.

He got out of bed and put on his clothes and walked to the kitchen and made coffee and drank it standing up and looked out the window at the town that had been his home for forty-two years and wondered what tomorrow would bring.

He didn't know. He didn't know at all.