Though he tried not to think of it, he supposed there had been a pattern to each relationship. Each place had taken a shine to him, and he to it, in the first rosy days, weeks, even years of his residence. He’d usually started out as a buck reporter, getting sent out to all the city council meetings and the two-A.M. accidents. He’d worked his way to editor in Alexandria and Moose Lake, started out that way in Stone Harbor. Jobs like that, it was his responsibility to get to know everyone in town, to form relationships. And he was damn good at that, rubbing elbows with mayors, police chiefs; charming the old guard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Lutheran church, to the point that they brought him Jell-O salads and invited him to their coffee klatch to introduce him to their unmarried daughters. How he adored the towns, then, hearing each side of each story and then taking a stand on issues ranging from the paving of streets to the ordinance restricting chickens in the city limits. Fielding calls from irate citizens who had been certain he was on their side. “Turncoat!” they called him, while he grinned, elated as only a man in love could be.

But then there would come a time when Harry would grow bored: in Alexandria, factions had argued for weeks about whether to paint the water tower to look like a fishing bobber. Harry had been so agitated about the time lost at three consecutive city council meetings that he’d finally stormed out, and got a good talking-to from Berglund, the publisher. The pattern, he supposed, was growing resentment, discontent. He would feel walls start to close in on him. Every place in every town that had once been exciting, fresh, and bewitching would begin to feel garish, repulsive, as with a lover who’d always seemed beautiful in candlelight whom you now saw naked in sunlight, eyeliner caked into crow’s-feet, blotchy skin, swirls of light brown hair all over her body.

Disgust boiling until it finally bubbled over, Harry would lash out with an editorial that alienated half the town. There was always a woman, too, who, when confronted with the full measure of Harry’s boredom and disgust, would run out sobbing, handkerchief clutched to her mouth. (He’d lost more handkerchiefs that way.) Until, finally, one day he would type up a brief letter of resignation, slap it on some bigwig’s desk, and walk out, catching a train to the next promised land, suitcase in one hand, typewriter in the other. He imagined that someday, when he was a famous novelist, they would paper a museum wall with his letters of resignation.