Cole Mercer was fifty-two when that sickness of memory began to seize him again. He worked in a small garage outside Providence, changed oil, changed tires, fixed noises in old engines, and his body had taken on the permanent shape of men who have spent their lives bent over metal. His hands smelled of grease no matter how often he washed them. At night he returned to an apartment with one bed, one table, one coffee pot, and two windows looking out onto a parking lot. He was not pitiable, and he was not exceptional. He was the kind of man people rarely remember correctly. And yet inside him he carried a story large enough to have bent the whole course of his life.