They'd been living in the old office building on the east side of the sugar mill property since the foreclosure, the decorative tin ceiling tiles tinged with green, the cracked plaster and lath walls lined with shelves of old Mason jars, some blue, some clear, all full of odd powders and residues, cobwebs, dead spiders. Bobby's parents, Elmer and Marcia, had offered them his boyhood room, but they'd asked instead to move into the decaying sugar mill property Elmer bought at auction years ago. It felt somehow more dignified to live alone, let them pretend that they were still independent thirty-somethings, that the life they'd built for themselves hadn't caught fire, burned to ash. Sunlight leaked through the yellowed curtains every morning, but by afternoon the place was all shadow, the light blocked by the six towering silos, still the tallest structures in town. Any day now, he was sure, he'd wake to find Amy folding her clothes, packing them neatly into an old milk crate.

You're lucky I lasted as long as I did, she'd say, gesturing from one side of the room to the other. This shit.

But Amy still kissed his forehead on her way out the door, flashed a brilliant smile, said something to make him laugh, “Chin up, jackass,” or some version of their wedding vows, “For richer and poorer.” Ten years into their marriage, Bobby knew every one of her smile lines, the way emotion morphed and shifted them. They betrayed her, revealed the true feelings she hid behind her brave face. Bobby knew she pictured, as he did sometimes, the granite countertops in their old kitchen, the Jacuzzi tub he'd installed for her on their fifth anniversary, the way the foreclosure notice had flapped and chattered with the breeze. There was no way to see so much loss as some grand adventure. It wasn't a human response.

There were two large outbuildings at the mill, one a skeleton, exposed, surrounded by piles of bricks where the walls had already crumbled away. The other still had its walls, doors he could lock, treasures to mine: rusted backhoes, trailers, old vehicles, dented metal lockers, beet crates. He'd seen this as an opportunity and filed an LLC on a garage of his own. Because it was all he could afford, Bobby put a spray-painted sign out by the road. Engines. Alignments. Oil Changes. Fair Prices.

Weeks passed and nobody came, and Bobby knew why. When times were tough, people learned to change their own damn oil. He spent his days reading the names of beet harvesters and plant workers listed in old handwritten payroll books, 1901–1938, paging through records of layoffs from Great Western's bankruptcy in the 1980s, name after name of hard-luck blue-collar guys from recessions past. He could conjure them if he wanted to. Ghosts with boots that needed resoling. Ghosts with coveralls worn to threads.