The answer to this is always hard to remember.

Sophie wants me to separate out every point of combat. She wants me to draw them on a timeline. But I cannot always remember who the enemy was, or where or when.

“There have been a lot of enemies in a few well-chosen hellholes.”

“Which one are you talking about tonight?”

“…Montcalm?”

“Are you sure?”

“The French lit the fire-ships…”

“We’ve been through the fire-ships.”

“We have?”

“We did the fire-ships last year and the year before. The fire-ships get you nowhere.”

She claims the French fire-ships are a story I repeat to distance myself from remorse. She says I project them over blasts I have myself inflicted, not only on soldiers but on civilians, even on children. I can hardly credit this.

“French fire-ships never frighten you for a second. You have total control over them. You know that as soon as you tell me the part about sending a man on a raft to nudge them with a rod, they’ll float ashore and burn like chandeliers on a Shakespearean stage. You’ll whoop at your post, best seat in the house.”

“I already told you about the raft?”

“You’re the one who raises or lowers the curtain. You decide everything as far as fire-ships go. I don’t want to hear about them again.”

“What do you want?”

“To look at my grandbabies on Facebook, then nibble your belly and stuff my snout in your gingerfuzz armpits to keep warm.”

“You’re supposed to keep me warm, that’s our deal. And I meant what story do you want? I need you to listen to at least one tonight.”

“You never finished telling me that interesting one about the dragonfly girls.”

“Why do you only want to listen to things that make me burn with shame?”

“You want to sulk? Go right ahead. Get mired in fire-ships for all I care. C’mon, nuzzle in.”

She clamps me in her thighs and rams her face in my side, licks and bites my nipple so it stands up straight in the canvas-and-maple air. My cough retreats into its lair. After all my mother’s disapproval of Eliza Lawson, after all my efforts to please Mama, I’ve taken up with a janitor who has four grandchildren and is twice my age. If ever I’d imagined sleeping with a fifty-seven-year-old woman in my early days, I’d have forecast dry skin and uninviting horrors. Not in a million years could I have foreseen the heat and salty-sweet of a grandma named Sophie Cotterill.