Bobby thought then that it did seem a bit much, a coat handmade from rabbit skins. He'd be likely to wear it even when he wasn't at the mill, and then what? He'd felt for a while now that his instincts about how to live had gone wobbly, that he was drifting slowly out of the community, caught in a riptide of ever-developing eccentricities, interrupted in becoming whatever it was he was going to become, the Great Recession and his own bad choices reacting like the baking soda and 7Up of his third-grade science project, either thing on its own benign, uninteresting, but erupting in combination, leaving a sticky coating all over his life, flies buzzing and biting. It took so much effort to do even simple things, to just exist. He wanted to bounce back, to believe in an inevitable recovery, but the world did not feel particularly elastic.

Amy surprised him then, put both her arms around his shoulders, pulled herself close to him, and he held her around her waist, closed his eyes, felt the heat of her breath spread across his neck. He let the rabbit skin drop to the ground.

Amy pulled back, made eye contact. “Bobby,” she said, “you keep making all this into something it's not, like it's the end of everything, like we'll never recover, and I can't . . . I'm going to need you to buck up a little, okay?”

“I'll try, Amy. Really I will.” Bobby pulled her into a close embrace then, caught the flash of the metal roof of the processing building behind her, brief, lovely, light like the spark of Elmer's old arc welder, the kind of light Bobby knew better than to look at directly, beauty that could sear his retinas. He felt the warmth of his wife pass clothes to skin, skin to muscle, muscle to bone, bone to cells, and he felt himself absorbent, porous, greedy for more.

BOBBY HAD GONE BACK to the last days of the Falcon project focused, calmed by a new sense of control. He saw the whole job, his next steps and the steps to come, lay themselves out in front of him. He just needed to get this car running and other cars would follow, and all the locks of his life would start to release, and everything that had been closed would open. He'd accepted that even if there was some sort of Quantitative Easing process for conjuring luck, it would be just like the cash the Fed printed during the recession, the lucky people getting all the new luck just like the rich people were somehow getting all the new money. He didn't have to use that as any kind of measuring stick for his own life, didn't need to measure his worth at all so much as remember it, touch it from time to time, protect it in the deep core of himself.