Haddon is a small town. Three thousand people. One stoplight. One high school. One diner. And for a hundred years, one factory.

Haddon Furniture Works made tables and chairs out of Michigan hardwood. Maple, oak, cherry. Four hundred people worked there at its busiest. Almost every family in town had someone at the Works.

My dad, Roy Harlan, worked there for thirty years. He was a woodworker. He could look at a plank of maple and tell you exactly what kind of chair was hiding inside it.

When I was a kid, he'd take me in on Saturdays. I learned to sand before I learned to ride a bike. I carved my first spoon at nine.

Then, when I was in high school, a big company from out of state bought the Works. They cut wages. They cut staff. They cut corners.

When I was twenty-two, they laid off a hundred people. I could see where it was heading. I packed a bag, borrowed Dad's truck, and drove south.

Four years after I left, they closed the Works for good. They moved everything overseas. Four hundred jobs, gone in a single afternoon.

Dad was fifty-eight. Nobody hires a fifty-eight-year-old woodworker.

He'd worked part-time at the hardware store ever since.

And the town had been dying slowly ever since too.