A lifetime ago, after high school graduation, while all the other kids his age were tending to their mullets and switching out their music collections to cassettes, Roy Dorring had been persuaded that three milk crates full of 8-track tapes were worth almost half the money he’d saved from stocking the shelves and cleaning the Slushee machine at the Q-Mart. The fourth time he broke the Slushee machine was the end of that job. His grandmother, brandishing a broom handle she’d used on him before, threw him out to go learn the world. He never did learn what to do about the world. But he’d kept the 8-tracks for years.

Long after his 8-track player finally died, he discovered that the miles of polyester tape inside them were good for creative repurposing—for braiding up replacement straps for overstuffed duffel bags, for holding together bundles of curtain rods or rags or whatever needed bundling, and for tying down his possessions in the backs of borrowed pickups when he had to move again.

He’d once even used a length of 8-track to splint his broken index finger to its neighbor when he couldn’t afford a doctor’s bill. It had worked, too, more or less. He never could make a proper fist with his left hand after that, but he’d never really been a fighter anyway.

Roy didn’t throw things out. He wanted, with a faintly hollow ache, almost whatever he could gather and keep. He liked having stuff in the way some people liked a big meal. He liked the feeling, the ambient pressure of plenty. It didn’t matter if it was frayed or dented or obsolete—he wanted it. You never knew what might grow a purpose when the going got odd.

But everything he owned these days had to fit into an old Ford Explorer with enough room left over to put the seat back so he could sleep. The mess was piled roof high and axle wide, but everything in there was only waiting for the right run of happenstance to be just what somebody needed.

That he was smelling bacon frying this morning was proof that he was right. And if that alone weren’t enough to renew his faith in his philosophy of keeping stuff (which it totally was), Roy sat up and stretched and discovered that his back felt like—well, like nothing. It felt like a plain old back, not a web of knots and fishhooks.

After a decent night’s sleep, he didn’t feel young, exactly, but he couldn’t feel every second of the hard fifty-seven years in his body either, and that was near enough to bliss to make him smile.