Middle Falls lay equidistant from Hartford and Norwich but not very near anything, with the Rhode Island border an endless drive away, those successive Main Streets with their peeling clapboard houses and the glaring franchise strips falling away under the headlights, the old state highway rising and sinking with the former farmland’s hilly roll. The hilltops were blue half the year, naked trees purplish against the snow, and then green. The town had been named after the second of three noisy, turbulent drops in the rocky, fast-running river, the Chunkaunkabaug, which had turned millstones grinding meal of wheat in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth the power chains of an arms factory supplying revolvers and rifles to the burgeoning West and the Union armies; the rambling brick structure later became a light-bulb factory, in turn abandoned, as Eisenhower gave way to Kennedy, to a swarm of small businesses that, segregating themselves behind partitions of roller-painted plasterboard, rented some fractions of the vast scarred floors, splintered oak perforated by bolt-holes and darkened by the rubber-soled work-shoes of men long buried. Ed and Owen’s start-up occupied first a few cubicles and eventually the second floor and finally the whole thing. Hartford’s insurance companies added themselves to the manufacturers and retailers, banks and investment firms in need of customized computer programming, and E-O gradually prospered. Ed and Owen joined the local middle class.