At school Larry and Travis were always together, eating lunch side by side, playing catch out on the field, going off to Larry’s house afterward to work on their project. Larry had explained to their science class that the two of them were building a robot that was supposed to put food in your dog’s bowl when you told it to, though it was hard for Nate to imagine either one of them getting it right.

Naomi ate lunch with Nate, unwrapping that horrible-looking egg salad sandwich her mother made for her every single day, without variation, accompanied by a handful of celery sticks and a vanilla wafer. If he were still friends with Larry, they’d be discussing the upcoming baseball season, but with Naomi, he talked about the cloud chamber or music. Though Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Beatles were still her favorites, she had discovered a pair of singers called Simon and Garfunkel. And there was another one she really loved—an artist like herself—named Joni Mitchell.

Amazingly, their cloud chamber was starting to look almost exactly like the one in the diagram in Scientific American. But they still needed an old watch with a luminous dial to put inside, so they could test if the chamber would reveal the presence of radioactive ions.

Nate’s grandfather was over at their house a lot more than he used to be, overseeing what was left of the chores with the half dozen cows that remained, lending a hand loading the milk in the truck to bring over to Meadow Gold. Sometimes Nate would see him looking out to the field behind the house where his father had disappeared.

“Poppa,” Nate said one afternoon as the two of them were pouring milk into the separator. “You know that science fair project my friend Naomi and I have been working on? The cloud chamber?”

“Thingamajig out in the implement shed.”

“I was wondering if you might have an old watch to give us. One with numbers that glow in the dark.”

“That would be my good watch, son,” Poppa said. “You think I’ve got myself a backup?” He’d gotten it years ago. Nate knew that every night when he took it off, he put it back in the original velvet box from the store where he’d bought it.

“I know it’s special, Poppa, but we’d take real good care of it. We’d have to take the glass off the front, but we’d put it back after.”

“Here’s how things were in my day, Nathan,” his grandfather told him. “If you had a loaf of bread, you were lucky. If you had a watch, you were a wealthy man. Nobody had time to think about what was happening up in the sky, with stars and what have you. We had crops to plant and cows to milk.”

“I know, Poppa,” he said. “I was just wondering.”