It’s not much easier confessing to Grandpa. I can’t believe you would let her down this way, Grandpa says. How hard Mame worked, two jobs, and sometimes weekends too, to keep this house running, to make sure Bill would have a future. She’s beyond sad, and discouraged.

Bill hangs his head and promises then, the weight of the world on his tongue, never again to let Mame down, never again to take for himself the fruits of someone else’s labor.

3

That February morning at the protest, Bill is smitten. The woman is dressed to draw eyes—a spaghetti-strap scarlet dress, matched with scarlet lipstick, shocking like freshly spilled blood—and he is indeed transfixed. He gives her a ride to an urgent care center and waits with her, solicitous and apologetic, his face an echo of empathy at her grimaces of pain. Afterward, her foot braced and bound, he procures a crutch for her, and when she expresses a desire to return to the rally, he offers to accompany her.

Seema is thirty-three and by now used to such attention from men. She’s amused by Bill’s bashful solicitude, and since her current plight is his fault, she doesn’t think twice about making use of him.

The march has emptied out in the Civic Center Plaza, and they stand under a tree at the back, Seema leaning against him for support, the lawn in front of them rippling with shoulders and heads, banners and placards.

Beside them stands a group of protestors dressed like Iraqi mothers, in black hijabs and abayas, wearing mournful masks and holding rag dolls that resemble dead children. They mime grief, raising hands to lips in slow motion as though to stifle a cry or beg for a reprieve. Seema notes that Bill is shaken. He can’t take his eyes off the group of mourning mothers, as if only now becoming conscious of the human toll of the war.

“The imagery is very effective,” she comments, to which he nods mutely.

He’s also clearly discomfited by the speeches—standard vehement denunciations of the war, peppered with words like hegemony, subjugation, colonialism, racism—and squirms at the violent invective directed against Bush and Cheney, Wall Street, Israel, America. He tries to hide his discomfort from her, though, by cheering and clapping with the crowd, especially during the songs.

“That’s Joan Baez singing,” she points out.

“Who’s Joan Baez?”

She opens her eyes wide at him. “She marched with Martin Luther King Jr.? She sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ at the March on Washington, the one where he delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech?”

Seema is a veteran of such protests, a little disillusioned. She knows what to expect: a parade of minority speakers before a self-congratulatory liberal White crowd that will afterward return to its safe White slice of the world, while the rest of them will still have to deal with whatever is transpiring.