The small white church on the county road. The VFW hall. The grange. The volunteer fire department’s auxiliary. The 4-H building at the fairgrounds. Every small town has a handful of organizations that hold the community together — and most of them are running on a phone setup held together with about as much duct tape as their annual budget allows.

Maybe it’s a single landline that rings in the fellowship hall when nobody’s there. Maybe it’s the pastor’s personal cell phone doubling as the church office number. Maybe the VFW just put their treasurer’s home number on the sign out front and called it good.