We moved into a boardinghouse a block from where I still worked three nights a week at the bowling alley. As Leo grew inside me, I worked my regular shift while Jim walked the sidewalks from Bandera to Texarkana looking for nightspots in which to give a humble show. We spent the afternoons together making love, and I still talked of Paris, I still thought it possible for our little family to go to France. Jim seemed neither for nor against the notion, simply preoccupied with getting work. Soon he found it, a Friday- and Saturday-night gig at a honky-tonk not far from Schnabel Park. I don’t recollect the exact name of the place, though I do remember Horse or Stallion being part of the sign. Jimmy lasted only two weekends there, as the tavern’s clientele were far more inclined to hear the twang and moan of some boy mocking Bob Wills or Patsy Cline, not some big-headed ex-soldier singing colored music from the cotton shacks of Louisiana. On that second and last Saturday night, I sat in the front sipping a Coca-Cola when an empty whiskey jigger hit Jim in the shoulder just as he was finishing up a rousing Lightning Hopkins song. I jerked around to see a tall sunburned ranch hand stand up and call my husband a nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch. Next thing I saw was Jim. He’d leapt off the stage with his guitar and was standing there in front of the tall drunk cowboy.

“That’s not a kind word. Don’t say it again.”

“I said you was a damn—”

Jimmy rammed the guitar neck at the man’s chest, stepped back, then swung his only guitar crashing down over the cowpoke’s head, sending him to the floor. A week after that Jim re-enlisted.

It was a hot bright day in August when Leo James Suther came into this world. The women in my family have always had small hips and Mama fretted about the delivery, but my Leo cooperated by weighing in at a very agreeable six pounds, five ounces. I squeezed him out like a pumpkin seed. Jimmy got a marriage subsidy from Uncle Sam so we were able to stay living off base. In late September we took what we had in savings and bought Jim a new guitar, a better one than he’d ever had. A Mexican man off Guadalupe ran a pawn shop and in the back of the store he kept a few high-quality items. He had a fox hair coat, a fine crystal decanter set, even a Civil War cannon without its wheels. The guitar hung by its strap on the wall. The man said it was handmade in Spain out of rosewood. We paid a month’s rent for it, and the Mexican was so pleased, he threw in that Dobro steel slide guitar for three extra dollars.