He hadn’t been back since the company shut down.

“I held on to it because it proved I’d worked there,” he explained.

“After the accident, people talked like I’d just turned up in an alley one day.”

I asked him about the work.

Not the explosion or his injuries, but the ordinary mornings before anything went wrong.

He said the factory smelled of hot metal and coffee.

He had worked alongside a woman named Elaine who sang off-key during inventory.

On Fridays he used to stop at a bakery and bring Joanne a cinnamon roll, even after she got married and moved across town.