Now I heard muffled voices coming from behind a wall, an ancient language, the colonel’s and then his wife’s, and I sat up in their brass bed in a robe I didn’t remember putting on. I held it closed at my throat though I was sweating and I felt suddenly queasy. The window shade was pulled, but a crack of white sunlight showed on one side of the heavy curtains I never hung. I remembered kiwi fruit sliced in half on a tray of tea, the colonel’s wife on her knees beside me, holding my forehead.

I swung the blanket and sheet away and sat up for my clothes. But there was just the empty chair. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, smelled tea. My mouth was so dry and it tasted terrible and I didn’t want to step out of this room. I heard the front screen door open and shut, and I got up to close the bedroom door, but Lester walked in from the hallway and looked at me like he wasn’t sure it was really me. Then he hugged me, pulling me to him, his neck wet with sweat. I put my arms around him and felt the gun handle sticking out the back of his pants, remembered my cupped hands under the faucet in the fluorescent light. Lester was hugging me hard, turning from side to side. I couldn’t breathe. I pushed myself away from him and stood there looking at him. His eyes were small and bloodshot, and there was a scratch on his nose, a small cut on his chin, his mustache crooked as ever. He stood so still, his long arms hanging there, that gun hidden behind him; he was every boy I had ever fallen for—lean and dark and over the edge—and I started to cry, covering my mouth and putting my hand out so he wouldn’t step any closer. I sat down on the bed and let it come.

Lester sat on the edge of the chair in front of me and rested both hands on my knees. They were big, his fingers so long I felt like a little girl, and I didn’t know if this was a good feeling or not. Then he got up and left the room, came back with tissues. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose. I couldn’t look at him and I didn’t want him looking at me. My bare feet looked blurred against the carpet, my toenails chipped.

“Tell me what happened, Kathy.” His voice was thin, exhausted. I could still hear the murmur of the Behranis in another room. “Do they know you just walked into their house?”

“Their house?” He looked behind him at the door, then down at the carpet. There was a piece of paper there and he picked it up, unfolded it, and handed it to me. I read it, my face turning hot, my stomach cold and hollow.

“They’re in the bathroom?”

He nodded.

I thought of the colonel’s wife bringing me tea and fruit, her lined, beautiful face giving me all her attention. “Shit.”

“Yep.” He took the note from me, folded it tightly, and stuffed it into his front jeans pocket. “I waited for you at the camp, but when you didn’t show up, I went looking for you and ended up here. I looked through the window and saw my gun on the counter and you weren’t anywhere so I guess I just feared the worst.” He kept his eyes on me a second, then looked away. He told me how he heard me moan, how he kicked in the back door and grabbed his gun, then saw me on the floor, and as he said all this, his voice steady, my head started to feel too heavy for my neck.

Now Les was using legal language about what he’d done: B&E, Brandishing a Weapon, False Imprisonment, all the real trouble he could be in. He sat in the chair with his elbows on the armrests, his shoulders hunched, his long fingers hanging there. I said: “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Why, Kathy? Why’d you think that?” He leaned forward and rested his hands on my knees.

“I don’t know.” I looked down at his arms, a long blue vein in the belly of his forearm. I told him about yesterday, when I started thinking for the first time how much he must love his kids and how they must love him, and how bad I felt squeezing myself into that picture. And so I made a sort of vow to myself to try and solve my problems without fucking up anyone else’s life, drove here to talk to the colonel’s wife woman to woman, but her husband came home and forced me into my car, and as I told Les this I felt angry again. I kept my eyes on the veins in Lester’s arm the whole time I spoke. His foot was bouncing slightly, then it stopped.

“When did you drink, Kathy?”

I told him, but I couldn’t remember what came first and what came later. I almost didn’t tell him about the woman at the gas station, but then I did and he asked if she got a good look at me, at the plates of my car.

“I don’t know.”

We were both quiet. He got up and sat on the bed next to me, put his arm around my back. His body odor was strong and his breath was bad, like old coffee, and this made me feel a little better, the fact his smell wasn’t pure and clean. Then I thought of my own teeth coated with dried stomach acid, and I kept my face down. There was a knocking on the inside of the bathroom door down the hall, the colonel’s muffled voice calling Lester “sir,” asking to be let out so his family could eat.

“This is crazy, Les.”

“Crazy?” He was holding me against him, his voice hot in my ear. “What about trying to kill yourself, Kathy? What do we call that?” He let go of me and stood, the pistol handle sticking out his waistband. “Just tell me this: was it drinking too much on a really bad day? Or do you really want to die?”

The colonel knocked on the bathroom door again. I looked back down at the Persian carpet, at all those dark reds and purples. My throat began to close up. “I just—”

“Yeah?”

“I just want things to change.”

The colonel pounded on the door. It sounded like he was using his fist. “You must to allow us food immediately!”

Lester leaped over to the doorway. “You’ll eat when you call the goddamn county!”

“Yes.” The colonel’s voice was low and dulled behind the closed door but I heard his next words clearly: “I will do as you say. We will sell.”

Lester looked back at me and smiled so wide his mustache went up in a straight black line above his teeth. But I could hardly move. I just sat there not knowing what I’d just won. I put my hand over my lips, and he walked over and squatted on the floor at my feet. “How’s that for a change?” He shook his head. “When I found out what you’d done, I felt stood up. Isn’t that strange? What does that say about me?”

I didn’t know what that said about him but I knew I felt closer to him when he said it. I reached over and took his hand, rubbing my finger over the ridge of his knuckles, down over his wedding band. “I don’t think I would have done any of this sober, Les. If that helps you.”

“It does.”

The colonel knocked again, this time softly.

“I’m going to have to keep the heat on them until they go, Kathy. Maybe you should leave until then.”

“I’m staying here.”

“Promise?” Les was looking into my face, his dark eyes so warm and full of need I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss him or move away.

He kissed me and one of his mustache whiskers went up my nose. I watched him leave the room, pulling out his pistol as he went. I looked around for my clothes, but they weren’t anywhere. So I got up, stood in the doorway, and watched Lester set a crowbar against the wall, push open the door, and step back with his gun at his side. At his feet on the rug were two neckties, and he told the Behranis to go into the kitchen. As they came out I pulled the robe together at my throat. I felt like stepping back into the bedroom and closing the door, but I knew they’d already seen me. Lester walked backwards in front of them, stepping into the doorway beside me to let them by. The colonel went first, then his wife and son, the colonel looking straight ahead as he passed me, his chin high, like he was marching in a military parade. His shirt was wrinkled and there was a dab of shaving cream just beneath his jawbone. I was impressed by this, the fact he took the time to shave. And looking at him in that moment, Lester standing beside me with his gun at his side, I was glad things were turning out this way, that this hot-tempered shithead was almost Middle Eastern history for me. But then his wife glanced at me without turning her head, and I knew she was scared of Lester and was trying to see where I stood in all this. I looked down at the floor in time to see their teenage son’s big brown feet.