“When I came to California,” she told Mason White, “I gave a ride to an old cook from a CCC camp. His wife was having a baby up in a mountain village in the Rockies. He took the wheel and drove like a fury.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Five years,” she said, and hearing her words, could not believe them, remembering the cook bent over the wheel like a large red bird with lidless eyes, forgetting for a moment all the faces in between that time and this.

“Nearly as long as I been in the army.”

“Do you have a wife and children in Houston?”

“Just my mother and sisters. But I think I will have a wife soon. They say things are going to be better now. The magazines, the newspapers say things going to be better for us. Better jobs. Better life.”

She felt the slight emphasis he had put on the word, us, as though he’d touched her arm; he hadn’t meant her.

“They can’t go back on it now,” Mason White went on. “People had good jobs in the war plants, they aren’t going back to mopping up grease.”

“You’ve always lived in Houston?”

“From the time we moved there from Alabama. My father had a little truck farm up there. One day, he was going to market. A white fellow came out of a side road and smacked into my father’s truck. My father came home and said, ‘Pack up.’ See, when they do you something bad, then they’re going to do worse. He hammered out the door of the truck where it’d been bashed in and we put what we could carry in the truck and we left that night and came to Houston because he had a brother there. Then, after we’d been there a year or so, my father moved on. I don’t know, none of us know, where he got to. My sisters, they’re both learning nursing. Things got a little better while the war was on. They can’t push us all the way back now.”

While Annie slept, Mason White brought them into Texas.

At Mason’s insistence, Annie had gone in alone to roadside stops, bringing them out sandwiches and coffee. “But you’re a soldier,” she’d protested.

“Don’t make no matter what I am.”