“I’m already late, Henry,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other as I peered under the hood of my car. “Cal’s going to think I’m not coming. Can you just—”

“Lizzie, I’m working as fast as I can. Would you just—” My brother pressed the heel of his palm into his forehead and took a long, slow breath. “You harping at me isn’t going to make me work any faster.”

“Sorry,” I said weakly. “We fought, that’s all. I really don’t want to go to this thing.”

Henry pursed his lips as he tightened a bolt on my engine with a spanner.

“I still can’t believe he’s a part of this,” my brother muttered, shaking his head.

I knew the feeling well. I was running late to a party intended to welcome a group of German families to their new home in Huntsville—celebrating their arrival as if they were special dignitaries. I hadn’t even left my driveway and my skin was already crawling.

Throughout our marriage, my husband and I rarely disagreed. But in the year since Calvin was transferred from El Paso to Huntsville, we’d rarely gone more than a day without arguing about the men he was now referring to as “our Germans.” He said everyone on base called them that, but whenever I heard those words, I wanted to scream.

My brother stepped out from beneath the hood, then slammed it closed. It seemed that whether he found work processing insurance claims in Chicago or laboring on the railway in Tennessee or selling tickets at a fair in Nashville, things inevitably went sour and Henry ended up back with me and Calvin. We never minded when Henry came to us—we’d even added a small studio apartment over the garage so he’d have a private place of his own. When Henry told me he was coming back this time, I called around until I found him some work at a lumberyard just a few miles away. A few weeks in, he seemed to be doing well.

Even so, if we’d had any other surviving family anywhere other than Huntsville, I’d have suggested he go to them instead. Henry spent less than a year in Europe in the dying days of the war and he never spoke about his time there, but he had come back a broken man. And now my brother did not need to be living in a town lousy with Germans.