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and to the swelling river, Eveline could hear Gunther yelling, Pow! and Lulu yelling, It’s not healthy to shoot your mama! which made Eveline smile.
    In the excitement of the morning and in the presence of the string of lovely bluegills, whose silver scales glinted inthe sunlight and would blacken tastily in the fry pan, Eveline forgot to give Emil the letter, which she had slipped into the pocket of her dress.
    “I’m glad you have someone to talk to now,” Emil said. He leaned over and kissed Hux, who was still asleep. “Women need women.”
    “What do men need?” Eveline said, worried Emil might kiss her, too, and taste the tobacco on her lips and disapprove of her spending time with Lulu, even though now that the weather had turned away from winter he often took a rosewood pipe onto the porch after supper and smoked what was left in the canvas pouch he kept in his coat pocket.
    But Emil only smiled. “Women.”
    Eveline went inside to put Hux down in the reed basket and get the fry pan and the woodstove ready for the bluegills, which Emil cleaned and gutted on the porch. If only they had butter, she thought, which brought her back to thinking about Lulu’s egg and the good fortune of her and Reddy planting themselves on the other side of the river, one step closer to Yellow Falls and the roads, which had been mostly washed away in the flood but which Lulu said she and her red pickup truck could manage on in a pinch.
    “What do you consider a pinch?” Eveline had asked Lulu.
    “No whiskey, for one thing,” Lulu had said.
    When Emil finished cleaning the bluegills, he brought them to Eveline the way he used to bring her field flowers when he was courting her in Yellow Falls.
    “What about Lulu’s husband?” Emil said.
    “She wants to punch him sometimes,” Eveline said, marveling at the potency of Lulu’s influence, since she would have simply said his name before her visit. Out in the bush it was easy to fall into the routine of saying only what was necessary.
    After Eveline coated the bluegill fillets with flour andplaced them in the fry pan, Emil threaded his fingers through hers. “I’m glad for your little hands.”
    “I don’t want to punch you if you’re worried about that,” Eveline said.
    “Not now,” Emil said. “But you probably will one day.”
    “That’s what Lulu said.”
    Emil poked at the bluegills with a fork. “It’s good to know Hux will grow up with a little friend. I had a wonderful playmate in Germany. Ava. She was better at everything than me. I’ll cross the river tomorrow and introduce myself to the husband.”
    “Reddy,” Eveline said.
    “The fish?” said Emil.
    Eveline gently swatted his hand away from the fry pan. “The husband.”
    Together, they ate lunch. After, Eveline cleaned the dishes with water from the rain barrel—another joy of spring! Hux woke with his usual hunger, and Eveline fed him while Emil worked on rigging up a shower in back of the cabin with the help of a second rain barrel, a brick oven, and a length of copper pipe he’d found in a pine tree after the flood.
    When a half hour passed, Eveline offered Hux her pinkie finger like Lulu showed her. Lulu said a half hour was long enough for him to get what he needed and short enough to avoid chafing. Eveline put Hux in the cloth sling she’d made and walked around the cabin, arranging Gunther’s mayflowers and wondering what Lulu’s cabin looked like.
    She thought of sketching her little son’s face. Hux had thick black eyelashes like his father’s and long thin fingers like Eveline’s. Before Lulu’s visit, Eveline had worried about Hux’s endless supply of tears. After the visit, she stopped. Everyone was tired, that was all.
    The three of them were up most nights now. Eveline would breastfeed Hux, and Emil would walk him around the cabin, bouncing him the same way he did when Hux was first born and Eveline was caught in that porous place between consciousness and unconsciousness,