The only details of the inside of the house where Luke and I lived that I remember now are those which I drew. The staircase you saw when you opened the door. A wooden staircase with a wooden bannister. Central to the house, with the kitchen to the left and the living room to the right. I spent hours drawing the wood grain in every stair.

It was a small house, belonging to a woman who had gone to Texas to be with her daughter who was having a baby without her husband. (sent overseas)

Sitting on her couch after Luke had left, I pictured our landlady and her pregnant daughter in a rented furnished house -- vacated by someone else whose husband also had shipped out in a wartime chain of dislocation.

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