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Sunday mornings in Fort Stockton have a particular looseness to them, like the town itself has loosened its belt a notch and decided nobody was going to jail before noon. The sun comes up polite, not bragging, just enough warmth to remind you that winter is a rumor told by people who don’t live here. It was exactly the kind of morning that begged for old sheet metal, open windows, and a slow drive into town for no reason better than habit.

So I took the ’60 Ford Fairlane 500 out to stretch its legs. Not race them, mind you. Stretch. Let the 223 Mileage-Maker Six clear its throat. Let the steering wheel talk back a little, the way modern versions filled with complicated technology can’t. The Fairlane has opinions, and Sundays are when it’s most inclined to share them. The windows were down, except the right rear one that has refused to go all the way since The Brady Bunch went into reruns, and Fort Stockton looked like it always does at that hour: sleepy, familiar, and quietly judging you for being out and about instead of sitting in a pew.

The Rusty Hammer Hardware Store came into view like it always has, which is to say it didn’t try very hard. No flashing signs. No slogans. Just the building, the porch, and the unspoken understanding that whatever you needed, or didn’t yet know you needed, was probably inside. I parked the Fairlane out front where it could be admired or criticized, depending on who walked by, and stepped into the particular climate that only an old hardware store can manage. Cooler than outside. Warmer than you expect. Smelling faintly of oil, rope, wood, fertilizer, and men who’ve been standing in the same place for decades telling the same stories with minor improvements.

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Rusty was behind the counter, of course. He is always behind the counter, even when he’s not. He has the posture of a man permanently shaped by leaning forward to listen and leaning back to think. His red beard was doing its usual thing, which is to say quietly stealing focus from everything else in the room. The Mr. Coffee was already working overtime, the stack of Dixie cups stood at attention beside it, and the Folgers can sat there like a silent suggestion rather than a demand.

Chad was there too, which told me immediately it was his day off from the Piggly Wiggly. Chad on a workday and Chad on a day off are two different people, distinguished mainly by posture and the speed at which they blink. Today he was loose, leaning against a display of seed packets like he’d earned it. Rex Hall stood nearby, making a short list in his head and a longer one on paper. He had the look of a man skipping church but still feeling vaguely accountable to something higher than the pharmacy schedule. Angus Hopper was present in the same way weather is present. You don’t always know how long he’s been there or why, but you accept that he is. And Hairless B29 came in behind me, carrying a bag of kitty litter like it was evidence of a lifestyle choice he refused to discuss.

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We all nodded at one another in that way men do when we’ve already agreed we’re going to be here a while.

The talk started where it always does, which is nowhere in particular. A comment about the weather that wasn’t really about the weather. Something about the Fairlane. Something about nothing.

At some point, Chad cleared his throat in a way that suggested he was about to tell a story, not because anyone asked, but because the air had made room for it. He leaned back, stared at the ceiling like it might help him line things up, and began.

He told us about being twelve years old, right after his mother died, when grief was still new enough to feel unreal. How his aunt had taken him to Florida in a well-meaning attempt to cheer him up, as if grief could be distracted by palm trees and hotel pools. He talked about sitting in a hotel room with a man who was technically his father but felt more like a distant relative you only see at weddings. A man cracking jokes Chad didn’t quite understand yet, trying too hard and not enough at the same time.

Outside, a storm had started to roll in. Florida storms don’t ask permission. Lightning flickered out over the ocean, and Chad felt that old, familiar panic start to tighten in his chest. Storms had always scared him. Something about the noise, the unpredictability, the reminder that the world could just do whatever it wanted.

His father went out onto the balcony and called for him to come look. Chad shook his head. His father came back inside, crouched down so they were eye to eye, and said he wanted to show him something. No speeches. No big declarations. Just an invitation.

They walked down to the beach together, the sand cool under their feet, the sky putting on a show. His father talked about watching storms from ships when he was younger, about how lightning over the ocean looked different, almost organized, like it had somewhere to be. Chad looked up and saw it too. Dozens of strands cutting across the sky, bright and strange and beautiful.

Then the rain started. Just a few drops at first. Then a lot. They laughed. Really laughed. The kind that sneaks up on you and surprises you into remembering you’re still alive. They ran back toward the hotel soaked and breathless, laughing the whole way.

Chad said that night his fear of thunderstorms eased. Not vanished, but softened. And somehow, so did his fear of death. More than that, something between him and his father shifted into place. Not fixed. Just… started.

When he finished, the room went quiet in the way it does when nobody wants to be the first to ruin a good thing.

Rusty broke it the only way Rusty could.

“At my age,” he said, without missing a beat, “to see the Northern Lights all I have to do is stand up too fast. Sometimes I even get a total eclipse.”

That did it. The moment passed, safely returned to the kind of reality Fort Stockton prefers. One where feelings are acknowledged briefly, then set down gently so nobody trips over them.

Hairless took his turn, announcing that he’d gone in for his annual physical. He said he’d waited and waited, and wouldn’t you know it, the exact moment he used the stethoscope to listen to his own balls was when the doctor walked in.

Rusty nodded in sympathy and volunteered that he’d recently tried shaving his private area using his iPhone as a mirror. “Everything went fine until I started getting multiple likes on Facebook.”

Chad, sensing an opening and unable to resist, added, “If you sneeze and fart at the same time, your body takes a screenshot.”

Angus, who we’ve never been entirely sure has never been married or has been divorced six times, mentioned casually that his wife had been missing for a week. The police told him to prepare for the worst, so he had to go back down to Goodwill and get all of her clothes back.

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We absorbed that without comment, because with Angus you never know which parts are jokes and which parts are invitations to change the subject.

Outside, Mayor Goodman drove by. Slowed. Looked. And kept going, for which we were all quietly grateful. I noted that the ancient Greeks, inventors of democracy, used to appoint officials to one-year terms and audit their finances before and after. If anything was amiss, they were tried and executed.

Everyone nodded. Some aspects of democracy, we agreed, had declined.

I wandered down the hose aisle then, not because I needed anything but because I wanted to. There’s something comforting about the order of it. The coils, the fittings, the sense that water, at least, could be directed if you tried hard enough. I took in the smell of hemp rope by the yard, the quiet creak of the wood floors that have held up generations of men pretending not to lean on one another.

I stopped by the big galvanized rotating nail bins and eventually leaned up against the counter where Rusty keeps the coffee. I picked up one of the Dixie cups, unfolded the tiny paper handle, and wondered aloud if anyone’s fingers had ever actually fit in those things. I tossed a buck into the Folgers can out of a sense of obligation and alleged brotherhood.

From the front of the store, I heard Rusty ask, rhetorically, “Does Chewbacca have a human dingus or one of those red-rocket situations male dogs get? George Lucas isn’t returning my emails.”

It dawned on me then that the conversations that happen at Rusty Hammer Hardware are entirely different from the ones that happen across the street at the Grounds for Divorce, even though the cast of characters is usually identical. I chalked that up to Lucinda being a positive influence. She keeps us from aiming too low, even when we really want to.

Angus, still pondering the Star Wars question, said, “Maybe stars aren’t stars at all, but holes poked in the top of the container so we could all breathe.” It was one of those statements that sounds ridiculous until you realize it’s not entirely wrong. It made me look at Fort Stockton differently for just a minute.

Rusty asked what stories I had coming up that we hadn’t already heard three times.

I told him about the five-part series starting tomorrow, the first of 2026. Class of 1943.

“Is it going to be funny,” he asked, “or like one of your normal ones?”

Comedy wasn’t the goal, I said. Something different. I told him he might like it, and if not, I’d offer a full refund, which was more than I got for the bulbs I planted last spring.

Rusty asked if I’d jump out of a plane without a parachute for a hundred thousand dollars. I said no.

“What if I told you the plane was on the ground?” he asked. Moral of the story: know all the facts before you open your mouth.

Rex laughed and then headed down the street to his call of duty. Chad tried not to, out of respect for something he couldn’t quite name.

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Rusty added that the bulbs probably didn’t bloom because I’d covered them with too much manure. Just like my stories.

I thought about Lucinda then, about the better coffee from the Bunn-O-Matic and the gentler insults waiting across the street. I wondered if it was too late to escape.

But it wasn’t really about escape. It never is. The Rusty Hammer isn’t a place you go to get things done. It’s a place you go to be reminded that life is ongoing, ridiculous, and occasionally meaningful in ways you don’t plan for.

I paid for my bulbs and manure, nodded to the group, and stepped back out into the sunlight, feeling like I’d just attended a service that didn’t pass the plate but still managed to take something from me. The Fairlane waited patiently, like it always does, as if it understood that nothing inside the Rusty Hammer ever really ends, it just adjourns. I started it up, listened to it settle into itself, and pulled away slow, resisting the urge to look back and make sure nobody had followed me home with a question, a theory, or a deeply troubling observation about Chewbacca. Some mornings you don’t need answers, closure, or even decent coffee. You just need to buy manure from a man who insults you for it and leave town before noon proves him right.

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