Potterstown had yet to recover from the departure of IBM, once its largest employer. These days, Potterstown was as much museum as city, its past glory evident less in its people—­many of whom walked around with something of a shell-shocked look, as if modernity itself had caught them unawares—­than in the fine old buildings that had outlived the purposes for which they’d been built. The domed, neoclassical former Potterstown National Bank, for example, was now a struggling coffee shop. A former shirt factory housed an organic bakery called Kneads that was, like the coffee shop, geared toward part-­timers from New York. For most of its full-time residents, Potterstown’s center of gravity had moved from downtown to the surrounding ring of strip malls, in which liquor stores, kidney dialysis centers, dollar stores, cigarette discounters, and military recruitment offices flourished. If it weren’t for the influx of city people each summer, Potterstown would be in far worse straits, like so many of the truly depressed towns farther upstate—­towns that didn’t even have a Walmart, let alone a Town Square; even with the city people, store #1512 was a low-­volume store, a training store, where corporate sent new managers to cut their teeth. The highest-­grossing and most profitable stores—­the ones they sent their best managers to—­were located in places whose fortunes had risen in recent years in inverse proportion to the nation’s Potterstowns. Affluent suburbs, places like Westchester County and northern New Jersey. And Connecticut. West Hartford was the big time.