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By Root 482 0

with their scores of tiny children’s graves. At night, lying in bed after love, Melissa held Dirk’s hand and listened to the stories until he drifted off to target practice. Pow- pow-pah-pow. His leave had ended a week ago and he was putting in eight-to-five at Bragg, ramping up for the next big thing. Colombia, Bosnia, the Middle East, or maybe Haiti Part II—the rumors mutated every couple of days. And when he left, what then—she dreaded that. At work she kept getting hangup calls, while on Saturday and again on Tuesday she accepted Dirk’s goodnight kiss and sent him off to sleep with his goddess. How did normal people live? She tried to remember. Meanwhile she waited for Rhee’s call as if waiting for the results of a medical test, which took more out of her than she realized; when Rhee phoned on Wednesday, Melissa felt the independence she’d nurtured all these years collapse in a sorry heap. Thank God for family.

“I’m getting some funny vibes on this,” Rhee told her. “And I was thinking it might help if I could spend a little time out at your place? I’d really like to have a look at that altar he’s fixed up.” They made arrangements for the following day: Rhee would meet Melissa at the office and they’d drive out to the trailer together, grabbing a bite to eat while they were there.

Just your basic lunch date, that was the tone of it. They hung up, and Melissa decided that she didn’t feel crazy. It seemed, rather, that reality itself had gone mad, and she was riding her own little scrap of sanity through the cosmic whirlwind.

Thursday was hot and sluggish, the sky hazed over with a scum of cloud the color of congealed bacon grease. The air had a dense, malarial weight—there’d been a rare outbreak near Myrtle Beach, more evidence of global warming—and driving out to the trailer Melissa cranked the air conditioning so high that her spit curls jumped and spun like small tornadoes. They got on the subject of Rhee’s boyfriend, a retired Delta Force sergeant who raised compe tition roses. “He sounds neat,” Melissa said, tobacco rows flashing past like shuffled cards. “You guys serious?”

“We’re seriously happy,” Rhee said, “with the way things are. We’ve got each other and got our space and that’s just fine. Neither one of us is interested in shacking up.”

“I hear those Delta Force guys are pretty tough.”

“Sure,” Rhee answered in an offhand voice. She watched the low sandy hills roll past, the scrubby brakes of saw brier and slash pine. “Men are funny, though. I never met one yet who didn’t need to be mothered at least a little bit. And I think people underestimate that side of sex, the maternal side of what goes on in bed. There’s a wild thing and there’s a needing thing, but nobody ever talks about that needing thing. Makes us all feel too vulnerable, I guess.”

“Sex is a swamp,” Melissa said by way of agreement. She turned off the paved road onto the mashed-granola track that led to the trailer, the woods closing around them like a green fog. Poplar and pine shafted through the porous undercanopy, the arching sprays of dogwood and pin oak; Melissa believed there was something watchful about deep woods, a biding if not quite sentient presence, like a block of vacant houses. Through the tunnel of trees they could make out the clearing ahead, the light flooding the open space with a jewel-box glow. “How nice,” Rhee exclaimed as they pulled into the clearing. The trailer was a long aluminum carton with flimsy black shutters, but Melissa had softened the package as best she could, with azaleas and flower beds planted along its length like piles of oversized throw pillows. Inside she showed her cousin to the spare bedroom, tensing as she opened the door. Today the altar seemed even gaudier than usual, as resistant to reason as a blaring jukebox. Rhee approached it with her hands clasped in front of her. Melissa lingered by the door, wondering what she was supposed to do.

“I guess you want to be alone?”

“Doesn’t matter!” Rhee answered briskly.

But Melissa felt an urgent need to be useful. She left, quietly shutting the