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because she had never done something like this.
    â€œWhat’s wrong? Nancy?” And his back’s joints popping, Mr. Warrant sat up. “Goddammit,” he shouted and pulled away from her.
    They fumbled in the dark, their legs sticky from her blood until he thumbed on the light, its three-way bulb only working on low, barely illuminating the two of them there, the covers flung back and Nancy’s panties the chocolate red of refused blood.
    â€œChrist, I’m sorry,” she said, and stood and surveyed the damage, her mind full of the necessity for towels, sheets, had it gone through to the mattress? Thinking, there really is no other bed.
    â€œGood God,” Mr. Warrant said looking up at her, past stained clothes, his eyes wide.
    She came around to him and sat, taking his shoulders, forcing his face away. He thought it was his blood, she said to herself. “It’s all right… it’s okay… it’s mine. I’ll go get some towels and clean sheets.”
    â€œNo, no,” he mumbled, his lips still thick from sleep. Both their breaths the concoction of the days’ odors.
    â€œI didn’t remember the blood, you know.”
    Nancy nudged him out to arm’s length. His wispy hair like a baby’s, his face discolored on one side. “It’s been thirty years I guess. All that… all of that.” She watched him look at her differently. She believed he wanted to grab the covers up or flee. His face was full of fear, and she knew hers was too. She believed they sat there looking exactly the same. She clenched his shoulders, her fingers dug into his flimsy flesh.
    Nancy worked quickly for almost half an hour until she finished and they slept. She had refused to leave. She wouldn’t dare go to the convenience store near the loop, out past the foundries. Instead she had folded one of his undershirts into a roll and pulled it between her legs.
    â€œShe’s changed,” the newer man said. But they never knew what they meant by that. And once, overhearing Marvin talk about the new girl he’d slept with, she had stepped around the corner just to shut him up for a moment. The triumph, she knew, only lasted until she was out of earshot.
    She went back once a week for over a month, but the doors were locked, and she never knocked, and though she had keys, she never put them into any of the locks.
    Her clothes came in boxes left in her carport or on the tiny front porch. They came over a period of weeks. One she recognized as the carton that had held the mugs. Later, she’d gone out to the shed and unlocked it and saw he had taken all the boxes.
    She handled some houses better now. She found she was less afraid when she saw buckled sidewalks and walls patterned by the bright squares from removed pictures and photographs.
    â€œYou scared me,” he had printed on the lid of one of the first boxes with a felt-tipped marker. She pictured his hand working a puzzle.
    Two months later she phoned him and his voice was as she remembered it, but now she knew he had never talked to her much and had never, she believed, looked her in the eyes until the night she had bled on them both.
    â€œHello, Mr. Warrant,” and she was pleased his voice was firm and not surprised. Neither hung up because of any of a dozen unarticulated thoughts that rushed like cold air, then hot, through both their minds. But though she begged him, he refused to take any rent at all and, until she moved downtown with Ms. Bojangles and across the courtyard from Madelaine Woo, he returned every month’s check in a brown envelope with the return address of some company carefully marked through.

RESIDUE
    Chris had come to this Asian desert for no good reasons. Sure, he’d gotten nervous the first month after the army’d finished with him. And, February, over a year ago, he’d met her dancing at some club across the county line where liquor stores stayed open to