Elgin, Ohio

Chapter 1: The Only One

The bowling alley smelled like machine oil and decades.

Percy Mabry stood behind the shoe-rental counter at six-fifteen on a Tuesday morning, running a rag along the Formica edge the way he did every day, tracing the same groove his elbows had worn into the surface across thirty-one years of ownership. Mabry Lanes occupied the ground floor of what had once been a feed store on the corner of Main and Sycamore, and it carried its history the way old buildings do—in the slant of the floors, the mineral smell of the foundation, the way certain windows refused to open and others refused to close.

Eight lanes. Two of them broken since 2019, their pin-setters seized up like arthritic knuckles. A snack bar that served nachos from a pump-cheese machine Percy had bought refurbished in 2004. A row of arcade cabinets along the east wall—Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, a racing game whose steering wheel had snapped off during the Obama administration—all dark, all dead, all standing there like tombstones for fun.

Percy was sixty-three. He was six-foot-one and had been six-foot-two before his spine started its slow negotiation with gravity. His hands were enormous, scarred across the knuckles from twenty-six years at the Delphi plant in Dayton before it closed, and his left ring finger still wore the gold band Charlene had picked out at a jewelry counter in Columbus in 1987. He kept his head shaved because his hair had started going gray in patches that made him look, in his own estimation, like a weather map.

He was the only Black person in Elgin, Ohio.

This was not a recent development. There had been others, once. His parents. His grandparents. The Beauforts, who left in 1971. The Hendersons, who followed in 1974. The Washingtons, the Coles—no, not the Coles, the Collinses—who packed up during the Reagan years when the foundry work dried up and the town started its long, slow exhalation. Percy's own children had left: Toni to Cleveland, Marcus to Atlanta, neither looking back with anything resembling nostalgia.

Percy stayed.

People asked him why, sometimes. The ones who were brave enough, or drunk enough, or new enough to town not to know the answer was complicated. He had a simple version he kept ready like a house key: "Charlene's here." And that was true. Charlene Mabry, née Charlene Eloise Dixon of Youngstown, Ohio, was buried in Elgin Cemetery on the east side of Route 15, in the old Black section that nobody called the Black section anymore because there was nobody left to name it.

Every Thursday morning, Percy brought her coffee.

Not metaphorical coffee. Actual coffee, in a thermos, poured into a ceramic mug he set on the flat top of her headstone. Charlene had taken hers with two sugars and a quantity of cream that Percy considered an act of vandalism against the coffee bean. He made it exactly that way every Thursday, sat in the folding chair he kept in the bed of his truck, and talked to her about the week.

He told her about the bowling alley. About the league nights that used to fill all eight lanes and now filled three on a good Friday. About the high school kids who came in sometimes, bored and loud and alive in a way that made the building feel less like a mausoleum. He told her about the weather, because Charlene had been a woman who cared about weather the way some people care about politics—with passion, with opinions, with a running commentary that could turn a cloudy Tuesday into a philosophical position.

He did not tell her about the loneliness. She would have known about that without being told.

---

Elgin, Ohio, sat in the flat agricultural middle of the state, fifty miles from anything that could be called a city without irony. Population 4,212 at the last census, and everyone knew the next census would be worse. The town had been built on three industries: farming, the foundry, and a regional distribution center for a grocery chain that had been bought, merged, and dissolved in the early 2000s. The foundry closed in 1986. The distribution center followed in 2003. The farming continued, but farming didn't need towns anymore. Farming needed GPS satellites and commodity futures and enormous machines that could be operated by one person wearing noise-canceling headphones.

Main Street told the story in glass and brick. The hardware store was gone, replaced by nothing. The movie theater had closed in 2011, its marquee still reading THANK YOU ELGIN in letters that had faded from black to gray to the color of old teeth. There was a Dollar General, a Casey's gas station, a diner called Rosie's that had never been owned by anyone named Rosie, and a public library that Elsie Paloma kept open through what Percy considered a combination of stubbornness and federal grant applications.

The school graduated twenty-three seniors last spring. One of them had been named valedictorian and salutatorian simultaneously, which was either an honor or a statistical inevitability.

People in Elgin said "back when" the way people in other places said "good morning." Back when the foundry was running. Back when Main Street had shops. Back when you could walk to the Woolworth's and buy a sundae for a quarter. The past was Elgin's only growth industry.

Percy understood this because he was, in some ways, part of it. He was evidence of Elgin's history, a living artifact, the man who proved the town had once been more than it was. People liked having him around the way they liked having the Civil War cannon in the park—not because they thought about it much, but because it would feel wrong if it disappeared.

"Our Percy," they called him. At the grocery store, at the post office, at the Fourth of July picnic where he had manned the same grill for twenty-seven consecutive years. Our Percy. As if he were a municipal asset. A landmark. A thing the town had built rather than a person the town had outlasted.

Percy did not hate Elgin. That would have required an energy he had stopped spending years ago. He existed in it the way a stone exists in a riverbed—shaped by the current, too heavy to move, too permanent to ignore.

But he remembered everything.

He remembered the school board meeting in 1989 when they redistricted the elementary school zones in a way that sent his children, and only his children, to a school forty minutes away by bus. He remembered his father, Leonard Mabry, sitting at the kitchen table with a loan rejection letter from First National of Elgin, the third rejection in two years, for a house that was eventually sold to a white family with a worse credit history and a handshake. He remembered Charlene sitting alone in the pew at First Methodist for three decades, surrounded by women who smiled at her and never once invited her to the quilting circle that met every Wednesday in the church basement.

He remembered all of it, and he kept it the way he kept Charlene's coffee mug—clean, ready, close at hand.

---

The morning the world changed was a Tuesday in early March, cold and gray in the way that Ohio does cold and gray, which is to say without drama, without the romance of snow, just a flat pewter sky pressing down on everything like a hand on a forehead.

Percy was behind the counter when the door opened and Mayor Dot Krzeminski walked in, trailing a cloud of vapor from her e-cigarette and the particular energy of a woman who needed something she was not going to enjoy asking for.

Dot was fifty-eight, built like a fire hydrant, and had been mayor of Elgin for eleven years, which she described as "a life sentence with bad benefits." She had the face of a woman who had stopped pretending to be patient sometime around 2016 and had never looked back. Her hair was cut short and practical, her reading glasses hung on a chain around her neck, and she wore a puffy vest over a fleece pullover that said ELGIN EAGLES FOOTBALL in cracked vinyl lettering.

Behind her came Bruce Ohlinger, the town manager, a man who moved through the world as if he were perpetually apologizing for taking up space. Bruce was forty-four, thin, pale, and wore transitional lenses that never quite committed to being either sunglasses or regular glasses, leaving him in a permanent state of optical ambiguity. He carried a leather portfolio that he clutched to his chest like a shield.

"Percy," Dot said.

"Dot," Percy said.

"We need to talk to you about something."

"Shoes are three-fifty. Lanes are twelve an hour."

"It's not about bowling."

"Then you're in the wrong building."

Dot took a long pull on her vape, exhaled a cloud that smelled like synthetic mango, and sat down on one of the molded plastic chairs near the counter. Bruce remained standing, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

"You heard about Voltkraft," Dot said.

Percy had heard about Voltkraft. Everyone in Elgin had heard about Voltkraft. It was all anyone had talked about for three weeks, ever since the Elgin Courier ran the story under a headline that used the word MIRACLE in all caps, which Percy thought was theologically ambitious for a battery factory.

Voltkraft was a Danish company that manufactured lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. They were building their first American plant. The short list was down to four towns: Elgin; a place in Kentucky; a place in Georgia; and a place in West Virginia that Percy suspected was included for political reasons. The plant would cost two billion dollars, employ three thousand people, and transform whichever town was chosen from a place people left into a place people came to.

For Elgin, it was not an opportunity. It was resurrection.

"I've heard," Percy said.

"Then you know what's at stake."

"Three thousand jobs. New tax base. Reason to fix the potholes on Route 15. I read the paper, Dot."

Dot leaned forward. "There's a complication."

Bruce Ohlinger opened his portfolio and extracted a printed document, which he placed on the counter with the care of a man defusing a bomb. Percy looked at it. It was a summary of Voltkraft's site-selection criteria, dense with corporate language and scoring matrices.

"Page four," Bruce said. His voice was tight. "Section 3.2."

Percy flipped to page four. Section 3.2 was titled "Community Diversity and Inclusion Index." It described a scoring rubric that evaluated potential host communities on demographic diversity, inclusion initiatives, cultural infrastructure, and—Percy read this twice—"demonstrated commitment to welcoming residents of all backgrounds."

"Huh," Percy said.

"Our score is low," Bruce said.

"How low?"

Bruce looked at Dot. Dot looked at the ceiling. Bruce looked back at Percy.

"Our score is you," Bruce said.

Percy set the document down. He looked at Dot. He looked at Bruce. He looked at the eight lanes stretching out behind him, six of them dark, two of them broken, all of them empty.

"Our score," Percy repeated.

"Functionally," Bruce said.

"Functionally."

"The rubric measures—"

"I can read, Bruce."

Dot took another pull on her vape. "Percy, we're not here to insult you."

"That's reassuring."

"We're here because we need your help."

And there it was. The ask. Percy had felt it coming the way you feel rain coming—a change in pressure, a shift in the air, the particular quality of silence that precedes a request nobody wants to make.

Dot laid it out. The Voltkraft delegation was coming in thirty days for a site visit. The delegation would tour the town, meet community leaders, review infrastructure, and assess the "cultural climate." Elgin needed to present itself as welcoming, diverse, and inclusive.

Elgin needed Percy.

Specifically, they wanted him to headline the site visit. Appear in promotional brochures. Join a newly created Elgin Diversity Council. Give the Voltkraft delegation a personal tour of the town. Attend ceremonial functions. Provide testimonial quotes about life in Elgin.

Smile.

"We're asking you to be part of the team," Dot said, which was a sentence so carefully constructed that Percy almost admired it.

"The team," Percy said.

"The welcoming committee. The—"

"The diversity."

Dot had the grace not to deny it. Bruce looked at his shoes.

Percy stood behind the counter and thought about the school board meeting in 1989. He thought about his father's loan rejection. He thought about Charlene sitting alone in the pew. He thought about forty years of being "our Percy," of being the town's evidence of itself, of being the Black man who proved Elgin wasn't the kind of place that didn't have Black people, even though it was exactly that kind of place, because everyone else had left.

He thought about the bowling league he'd run for twenty years, the one no one from the town had ever joined, not because they were hostile, not because they were cruel, but because it had simply never occurred to them. Percy's league. Our Percy's league. A thing that existed in their peripheral vision, acknowledged and unvisited, like the cemetery, like the foundry ruins, like everything in Elgin that was real.

He thought about all of this in the time it took Dot to exhale another cloud of synthetic mango.

Then he said, "Fine."

Dot's face opened up like a window. Bruce's shoulders dropped three inches.

"My rate is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Percy said.

The window closed.

"I'm sorry?" Dot said.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand. For the full package. Brochures, testimonials, handshakes, council appearances, the tour. All of it."

Dot laughed. It was a short, sharp laugh, the kind that comes out before the brain catches up to the ears.

Percy reached under the counter and produced a manila envelope. From the envelope, he extracted a single sheet of paper, typed and formatted with the precision of a man who had spent the previous evening at his kitchen table with a laptop and a purpose.

He slid it across the counter.

The letterhead read: MABRY REPRESENTATION LLC. Below that: Supplying Diversity Services to the Village of Elgin.

The invoice was itemized.

Brochure appearances (up to 6): $40,000
Testimonial quotes (up to 10, subject to approval): $25,000
Ceremonial handshakes (per event): $5,000
Diversity Council membership and attendance: $50,000
Archival memory consultation (oral history, family records): $30,000
Site-visit tour guide services: $35,000
General representation and goodwill: $40,000
Surcharge: Being asked where I'm really from: $25,000

Total: $250,000

Payment terms: Net 30. Late fees apply.

Dot read the invoice. She read it again. She looked up at Percy. Percy's face was as still and flat as the counter between them.

"You incorporated yourself," Dot said.

"This morning. State of Ohio, online filing. Thirty-nine dollars."

"Percy—"

"You're buying diversity, Dot. I'm selling it. This is the price."

Bruce Ohlinger's transitional lenses had gone dark, which meant either the light had changed or his blood pressure had. "This is— You can't— This isn't how—"

"How what?" Percy said.

"How things work."

"Bruce, you walked into my bowling alley to ask me to be your Black friend for a Danish battery company. I think we're past how things work."

Dot stared at the invoice for a long time. Then she folded it, put it in her vest pocket, and stood up.

"I'll take this to the council," she said.

"You do that."

"They're going to have questions."

"I'll be here. I'm always here. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

Dot walked to the door. Bruce followed, clutching his portfolio. At the threshold, Dot turned back.

"Percy."

"Dot."

"Is this real?"

Percy looked at her with an expression that contained sixty-three years of Elgin, Ohio.

"It's the first real thing this town has ever said to me," he said. "I just put a number on it."

Dot left. The door swung shut behind her. The bowling alley settled back into its silence.

Percy picked up his rag and went back to wiping the counter.