“Oh, yes, definitely,” Honey said, leaving out her dad’s grandmother from somewhere in Hungary, the woman a Gypsy who had stored money away and left her dad enough to buy a coal mine and go broke. Honey said, you bet, her people were all of pure German stock, because it was what Walter wanted to hear, and because it didn’t matter to Honey if Walter was a butcher. So was her brother Darcy, in prison. She liked Walter’s air of mystery, a lot different from how the good ole boys in Harlan County acted. Detroit had a lot of hotdog southern boys, too, working in plants. If Walter was fourteen on the eve of the Great War, he would have been thirty-eight the day they met.

He said when his father brought the family here, only months before the beginning of the World War, he was furious. In only three years he would have been a grenadier in the German Army.

Honey said, “You were anxious to fight Americans?”

“I didn’t think of who was the enemy, I wanted to serve the Fatherland.”

“You wanted to wear a uniform,” Honey said, “with a spike on top the helmet. But you might’ve been one of the twenty million killed or wounded in that war.”

He paused but kept looking at her. “How do you know that?”

“I read,” Honey said. “I read Life and all kinds of magazines. I read novels, some of ’em about war like Over the Top by Arthur Guy Empey, and my dad told me what it was like over there. He was gassed on the Western Front when it wasn’t all quiet. My dad talked funny, real hoarse. He was funny anyway.” She said after a moment, “The shaft he was working flooded and my dad drowned.”

Walter said, “Did you know another twenty million died the year following the war?”

“From the Spanish flu,” Honey said. “It took both my sisters and my baby brother. My older brother’s still home. He’s worked mines, but prefers other pursuits.” She didn’t mention Darcy was in prison.