23
The Igloo
“Good night, Sugar Daddy,” Auntie Carmen was drunk. She sat in her cloud of smoke, cracking crab with her sisters until all the white men they had
married had gone off to bed. Her husband Fergus had retreated, limping severely, as he always did when he was tired. Injuries he’d received in WWII still gave him a fair amount of pain on
cold nights. The Death March had claimed the lives of ten thousand Filipino and American men, along with three of Fergus’s toes, from gangrene. Carmen kissed him softly on the cheek,
dismissing him for the night. “Still a hell of a man,” she said after him. “That damned, brutal Japanese Kempetai tried its damnedest to destroy my man, but he made it.
Thank God, they had each other.” She flashed her black eyes at Grace.
Grace sipped her gin sa
