Suzanne nodded obligingly and said we should get coffee tomorrow after church. That was nice. I was on my own, so my weekends got a little lonely, sometimes. I told her I’d come find her after the service.

I made the short walk to what we called our “downtown.” Despite what I’d said to Suzanne about good light, there really wasn’t any. The late afternoon sun was having a hard time breaking through the cloud cover. Everything looked sort of dismal. Early April is like that in northern Wisconsin — spring in name, but not in fact.

Downtown was a single street of stores, bars, and eateries. Dorf isn’t large enough to attract the big chains, so we mostly still had Mom-and-Pop operations. A lot of them were hanging on by a thread. The slightly rundown look of the buildings was sad, but it did make for good photos, so long as you could bring out the rootedness and persistence that gave the place its dignity.

I wandered down the street, taking pictures and greeting passersby. I knew most of them by name — Kathy, the dentist, whose little sister I’d gone to school with; Victor, a forty-something welder, out shopping with his son; Bernice and Frances, a pair of octogenarian “spinsters” who’d shared a home for fifty years, and whom the denser members of the community still hadn’t figured out were a couple.

That’s what it’s like when you grow up in a small rural town. There are only so many people, so many houses, so many jobs. Spend a few decades there, and you’ll be able to call the whole place up in your mind — not just the landscape and streets and buildings, but all the people, for better or worse. You’ll see their connections to one another in your mind’s eye. You’ll know their histories, stretching back like long, knotted tails. And you’ll be able to see their futures stretching out ahead of them with nearly as much certainty.

It was comforting. Safe. But also oppressive. The future Dorf had in store for me didn’t look too good.

I paused across the street from J.T.’s, the seediest of the three bars on Center Street, complete with dented metal siding, crumbling front steps, and ancient neon beer signs in the windows. To my eye, something about the place said, I have been loved for a long time by people who would never admit it. But I’d never managed to capture that feeling. In my pictures, J.T.’s always just looked like a sad old dive.

I composed a shot, but just as I took the picture, Jim Foley opened the door and stepped out. Stumbled out, really. I watched him weave down the sidewalk.

Poor guy.

Everyone in town knew his wife had left him.