Pete sits behind his desk just off the showroom of Macdonald Motors in Bridgton, twirling his keychain. The fob consists of four enameled blue letters: NASA.

Dreams age faster than dreamers, that is a fact of life Pete has discovered as the years pass. Yet the last ones often die surprisingly hard, screaming in low, miserable voices at the back of the brain. It’s been a long time since Pete slept in a bedroom papered with pictures of Apollo and Saturn rockets and astronauts and space-walks (EVAs, to those in the know) and space capsules with their shields smoked and fused by the fabulous heat of re-entry and LEMs and Voyagers and one photograph of a shiny disc over Interstate 80, people standing in the breakdown lane and looking up with their hands shielding their eyes, the photo’s caption reading THIS OBJECT, PHOTOGRAPHED NEAR ARVADA, COLORADO IN 1971, HAS NEVER BEEN EXPLAINED. IT IS A GENUINE UFO.

A long time.

Yet he still spent one of his two weeks of vacation this year in Washington DC, where he went to the Smithsonian every day and spent nearly all of his time wandering among the displays with a wondering grin on his face. And most of that time he spent looking at the moon rocks and thinking, Those rocks came from a place where the skies are always black and the silence is everlasting. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took twenty kilograms of another world and now here it is.

And here he is, sitting behind his desk on a day when he hasn’t sold a single car (people don’t like to buy cars when it’s raining, and it has been drizzling in Pete’s part of the world ever since first light), twirling his NASA key-chain and looking up at the clock. Time moves slowly in the afternoons, ever more slowly as the hour of five approaches. At five it will be time for that first beer. Not before five; no way. You drank during the day, maybe you had to look at how much you were drinking, because that’s what alcoholics did. But if you could wait… just twirl your keychain and wait…