The Works reopened on the first Monday in March.

There used to be a steam whistle on the roof. Every morning at seven o'clock for a hundred years, it blew to start the day shift. You could hear it all over town. People set their clocks by it.

It hadn't blown in six years.

We fixed it.

At seven o'clock on that Monday morning, my dad climbed the ladder to the roof, very slowly, with everybody watching from below. He put his hand on the big brass handle.

He looked down at me. I nodded.

He pulled.

The whistle screamed across Haddon. Long and loud and clear, over the rooftops and the water tower and the empty stores on Main Street.

All over town, people came out onto their porches. Old men in their slippers. Women in dressing gowns, holding coffee. Kids on their way to school stopped in the street.

Some of them were crying.

Kristen told me later that she heard it in the diner and had to sit down.

Then two hundred and fifty people walked through the gates of the Haddon Furniture Works to start their first shift.

The saws started up. The sanders started up. And the smell of fresh-cut Michigan maple drifted out over the town again.