He shook his head at this, angry at the bumper-sticker-stupid self-pity of the sentiment, feeling the fog of too many nights with too little sleep, and punched a button to lower the driver’s-side window. The air was cold, the wind blowing hard from the northwest, and the chill helped to wake Dale a bit as he came out onto the Hard Road just a mile southeast of Elm Haven.

The Hard Road. Dale smiled despite himself. He had not thought of the phrase for decades, but it immediately came to mind as he turned back northwest onto State Highway 150A and drove slowly into the sleeping town.

He passed an asphalt road to his right and realized that they had paved County Road 6 between Jubilee College Road and the Hard Road sometime in the last few decades—it had been muddy ruts between walls of corn when he had lived here—so now he could drive straight north to Duane’s farmhouse if he wished. He continued on into Elm Haven out of curiosity.

Morbid curiosity, it turned out. The town itself seemed sad and shrunken in the dark. Wrong. Smaller. Dead. Desiccated. A corpse.

The two business blocks of Main Street along the Hard Road had lost several buildings, disorienting Dale the way a familiar smile with missing teeth would. He remembered the tall facade of Jensen’s Hardware; it was now an empty lot. The A & P, where Mike’s mother had worked, was gone. He remembered the glowing windows of the Parkside Cafe: it was now a private residence. Lucky’s Grill on the other side of the street appeared to be some kind of flea market with stuffed animals staring out at the Hard Road through dusty black eyes. The Corner Pantry market was boarded up. The barbershop next door was gone. Bandstand Park was worse than gone—the tiny yard-sized space was now cluttered with a tiny VFW hall and various tin sheds, the bandstand torn down, the trees uprooted and their stumps cut out, and the war memorial hidden by weeds.