“Have you heard yet?” she asked. “Have you gotten any news?”

He wrestled with his hands and then slid the cigarette box across the table with a flicker of disgust. He looked out at the rain and said, “I should have waited for them.”

Kim placed both palms against the table’s edge and stopped the box as if she were a goalie. “You had no choice,” she said.

“No,” he said, “I could have stayed, but I chose to leave.”

“They were locking up American sympathizers. Who would you help locked up? Would you help your wife the way Duc is helping me?” Her hands trembled with her jolt of fury. Her voice was full of strain. Everyone knew that once he turned his camera from snapping pretty girls to documenting the decimated villages and then the war crimes, Bao’s life was at risk. She wanted to tell him that he was being stupid, irrational. But her reflection in the window revealed to her the disgraceful transparency of a schoolgirl. Instead, she shut up. She slid out a cigarette and lit up.

They said nothing, sitting in silence for what seemed like a long while, until Bao finally spoke. “What happened with Sophia yesterday, at least you got that. It made me realize that my boys will probably be men by the time I see them. I have to become a citizen before I can be a sponsor. Did you know that? Who knows how long that’ll take?” After six months, alone in a new country, Bao told Kim that he finally understood the depths of loneliness, its tendency to weaken the mind. “That’s why widows and prisoners are permanently changed,” he said.

Kim stroked the backside of his hand only once. She wondered which was worse. To be stuck in Vietnam while you knew your husband was free? Or to be free while your husband was imprisoned?

After an entire afternoon of beauty school and inhaling nail polish remover at Miss Marty’s Hair Academy and Esthetic Institute, Kim returned home to the smells of sautéed onions and fried fish. Inside the cluttered kitchen Trang stood over a cutting board with her head bent low. Without looking up she lifted her knife and pointed toward the window. “Playing,” she said. “It’s a good day. No fights and no crying.” She leaned in with her great weight and halved an onion. “Tri’s bringing the boys back and he’ll be bringing some friends over too. He wants to introduce us to Monday Night Football. ‘An American tradition, ’ he said. ‘Just potato chips,’ he said. But my husband said it’s dishonorable to have people over with no food to offer.”

Kim rolled up her sleeves. When Huong came home she joined in too. When her youngest brother Tri arrived with his friends, they wowed at all the food. “Four variations of fish sauces to choose from alone?” The single men said they hadn’t seen anything like it since they left their moms and sisters back in Vietnam.