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stop going on now and let you get out of here. Have a nice visit with your friend, Abbi.”
    Abbi nodded and left the building with Benjamin, his buttons properly aligned now. They got into the Durango. She didn’t understand. Anyone with one working eye could see her husband withering away to a skeleton, the man who came back from Afghanistan wearing Benjamin’s clothes and face and voice wasn’t the one who went over. She needed someone to say it first, to give her permission to cry out, “Yes, yes, you see it, too. I’m not crazy.”
    She knew these people cared about Benjamin, and her. Why wouldn’t they help?
    “You going now?” Benjamin asked, turning onto their street.
    “Yeah. What are you doing?”
    “I don’t know. Something. Nap, maybe.”
    He pulled his squad vehicle onto the grass in front of their house so he wouldn’t block her in and wordlessly walked inside. She started her own bumper-stickered Volvo and sped north, the road pink, as if sunburned. Insects pelted her window, exploding in sticky bursts of yellow and orange. She flicked on her wipers, trying to wash the blood away before it baked on in the heat.
    “Abbi!” Genelise said, squeezing her as she arrived at the park on the edge of the Missouri River. Her friend wore her hair half blue today, brushed to one side and moussed in long spikes.
    “Don’t suffocate me. I just saw you last week. And we talked for an hour last night.”
    She pulled back. “You look tired.”
    “So do you.”
    For several months Abbi had driven up to Pierre on Sundays to help Genelise’s church give out food and clothing and toiletries, or little things that had been asked for the previous week; one woman pleaded for a tube of lipstick, to feel pretty again—“At least my mouth will,” she said—and a man wanted black socks because they looked less dirty after days of wash-less wear. And Lulu begged for a toaster. She had three already in her cramped, subsidized one-room studio in the senior housing building, but someone brought her another, which she petted and carried around under her arm like a prized Chihuahua, black electrical-cord tail dragging.
    Lulu ambled over, shiny silver toaster hugged against her side. Her breasts swung long and heavy beneath a man’s white T-shirt. “Yoo-hoo. You girl. Didja bring those plums again?”
    Last week Abbi had brought bags of extra-ripe plums too old for the Food Mart to sell. She’d rescued them from the dumpster behind the store when she found out they’d been tossed; she would have asked for them—and Jerry would have given them to her—if she’d known before the overzealous stock boy decided to take his job seriously for once. No harm. The plums washed fine, and Lulu had eaten nearly half of them. Abbi had watched her, juice dripping from her chin, and couldn’t help but think, “ Forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold.” Benjamin’s fault. He’d read her William Carlos Williams’s poems when they were in college, over and over, until she told him she was sick of wheelbarrows and chickens, and men dancing in front of mirrors and yellow shades.
    “Sorry, Lu. No fruit today. I have some heads of cabbage, though.”
    “What do I want that for? I don’t buy cabbage ’cause I don’t like it, so why would I take it now it’s free?” And she walked away in her sparkly blue jelly shoes, backs cut out to accommodate her swollen heels, lined with deep cracks, dried riverbeds splitting the thick, yellow skin.
    “I’m sorry,” Abbi called again. Lulu raised her arm and swatted at the air above her head without turning, but another church member came to her with an orange, and she bit away a hunk of rind, spat it on the ground, and continued to peel the fruit.
    Abbi loved the action of these people around her, their living, breathing faith. Not like the amputated Christians she’d known, those who waddled about as if their limbs had been hacked off, unable to reach out into the world