“Same old trash. Different day.” He did not have the heart to tell her he had quit showing up and the uniform was only for her benefit.

He moved the baby from his wife’s breast and kissed the black nipple that had wrinkled into a soft, sweet raisin.

“When he gonna get away from these so I can come back?”

“When he gets teeth,” Tawana said as her moisture began to mix with the bathwater.

“Isn’t it about that time?”

“My God, he’s not even four months Billy!”

“How long I gotta wait then? When my son gonna get some teeth?”

“I don’t know. You can’t never tell.”

“I thought women automatically know these things,” he said with his mouth almost completely over hers.

“You tryin’ to say I ain’t a woman?”

“I don’t know—why don’t you get out of that tub so we can find out?”

He removed his son, now fast asleep, from Tawana’s breast, dried him, then wrapped him in a fresh nightshirt. He surrounded him with Tawana’s crocheted blankets in the crib at the foot of the child’s five-year-old sister’s bed. Then he returned to the bathroom to pull his wife from the tub, dripping wet and with soap suds still clinging to her back. She pointed to the kitchen, wanting him to know that with a little extra money she had made his favorite that night—candied sweet potatoes and chicken baked to a perfectly seasoned crisp.

She protested momentarily, then surrendered and allowed her body to loosen up for him. She was surprised by his affection, and found she missed it. Usually, his conversations with her were not at all flirtatious or marked by curiosity of the babies’ firsts. He could burden Tawana’s ears for hours with grisly details of the differences between babies’ and adults’ bullet-ridden flesh, or of the similar appearance of yellow, brown, and white skin peeling with third-degree burns. A war veteran at twenty-four, his idea of pillow talk was describing how he had learned how to aim a shell just right, perfectly, patiently, so that its fuse could detonate just by passing near his target. Sometimes foreplay was hours talking about all the blurry, watermarked pictures he had saved of the stone-faced men he had befriended overseas—most of whom met their demise over there, and the rest of which never spoke again once they disbanded after the war. In her attempts to understand and connect with him and relieve his anguish, Tawana would just follow his lead and chuckle or cry at these disgusting stories. She never joined him and shared any of her pain—her loneliness, her uncertainties, her desire for adventure, her wish for a real kitchen to cook in.