Isaac worked at Bill Harper’s garage, just beyond the edge of town, where the road bent in a gray curve toward the highway and the trucks passed with the sound of people who were never going to stay. They fixed brakes, tires, leaks, wrecked exhaust systems, whatever the place dragged in. Isaac was good at the work. That was both blessing and curse. When you are good at something in a small town, you become necessary. And when you become necessary, it gets hard to leave.

His father had died eight years earlier from something that began as a bad cough and ended as lung cancer and bills you no longer call bills, you call them a curse with details. His mother, Doris, still lived in the same house with the same faded furniture, the same cross-stitched cushions on the couch, the same curtains that permanently smelled of dust and filter coffee. His younger brother, Caleb, had gone into the army, come back more broken than he had left, and now lived two blocks away with a woman who loved him more than he believed he deserved.