“He was that way before we even went to the mountain. You know how he was supposed to cook and do the housework for a while after the baby was born? That lasted two days, exactly. He swept the house and made the rice and tea. The baby had to eat every three hours then, so I kept waking up all the time. All night and all day. Every three hours. And every time he ate, he shat. Eight times a day. It was green. At first, very dark green, then a chartreuse. After a few weeks it turned yellow. That was so beautiful. They weren’t shit colors, they were deep and bright. The shit was so soft it was like oil paint, straight from the tube. And it didn’t smell bad, really. Strange, but not bad.

“Anyway, the third day I was up in the morning feeding the baby. When I put him to sleep I made some tea and brought it to Han Shan. He’d been trying to be nice. He thought I was mad at him for running away when the baby was being born, so he kept asking if I wanted anything and then making a huge mess in the kitchen. I brought this bowl of tea for both of us to have in bed. He sat up and asked me how I felt. I said, ‘Fine.’ Starting from then he didn’t do anything more. He left it all for me.”

“Well, you always wanted to be a squaw.”

I shouldn’t have said it. It just came out. It took a second to hit her. Then I could feel her shrinking away from me. Her whole body shied from my touch.

“Carlotta, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that, the way it sounded. I meant that things were already set up that way between you and Sam. You’d always done the work.”

Her black eyes pounded me with hate.

“I’d forgotten about you. The way you are. You never even came back after you saw the baby. All that fine advice before he was born, and then you just dropped out.”

“I know. I know. I hide my head during the scary parts in the movies, too.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Carlotta, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’d like to have been brave and smart. I wanted your baby to grow up. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t. I thought that he’d be peculiar, but that he wouldn’t have the same things wrong with him as Sam and me. And maybe you.”

The moving water in the machine changed speed. Carlotta cried quietly. The lady in the corner nibbled the end of her nail file and read the ads in a ragged section of a derelict magazine.