The rain is slackening off, and Ed kicks the wipers back to intermittent. He has no idea where he’s going, a fact that bothers him. He wasn’t brought up to do meaningless things. Every car trip must have a purpose; every man feeds his family. The weight of his unemployment, call it that, a more accurate name for early retirement, feels like shame. Even in the darkest days after Stacy’s death, he had his job, his work to retreat into. Retreating from Alice, from her unassailable grief. He grieved, too, but Alice’s grief was like a mushroom cloud, obscuring and consuming. He might have believed that she loved her grief. So he worked. He kept his distance. He allowed his own sorrow to form a thick scar of manliness. No one ever asked him how he was doing, patted his hand or his back. The workers in his plant did treat him with a softer deference for a few months, but then they allowed him to master his tragedy.

“So, where’re we going, Buddy?” Ed pulls gently on the dog’s ear.

The dog sighs, a rattling exhalation. He seems to sense Ed’s distress and leans against him as if to help shoulder the burden of his thoughts.

“I know where.”

The rain has stopped completely as Ed reaches the old pistol factory ruins. A rude parking lot has developed alongside the road, where fishermen and hikers leave their cars. Shattered glass, cigarette butts, and soggy beech leaves litter the stony turnout. The place is empty right now, midday, a school day, a workday. He and Buddy are the only souls there. Ed realizes that he has no leash; he’s left the house in such a hurry, he’s forgotten it. Rather than chance the dog’s getting hit by an oncoming car, Ed takes him into his arms and carries him across the road to the ruins. The dog doesn’t even squirm, but he does lick Ed’s nose, as if to say, This is cool.

The brick facade of the pistol factory is intact, although all the windows are gone and the interior has been gutted over the past hundred years. Rumors at the zoning meeting last night suggest that some developer has a plan to buy the place and turn it into something. Someone said condominiums; someone else had heard shops. Locals chuckled at the notion that anyone would buy a condo in Moodyville, much less draw the traffic that would support a bunch of chichi shops. Ed would love to see it purchased by a small manufacturer and have it restored back to its original purpose. Maybe not pistols, but certainly something could be produced here. The place still has good bones.