Lizabeth is a proud grandmother. Burnished frames crowd together on her living room mantle, featuring her loved ones' faces above the fireplace. Above an overstuffed chair hangs a large, woven banner. It bears the cherubic, slightly inaccurate, face of her first grandchild, Keesha. She remembers the picture it was based on. It is the only photograph of her beloved granddaughter, taken just after she was born. Rashad, the girl’s father, visited Lizabeth the night before he shipped off to Vietnam. Clean for the first time in months, promising to make a change, calling her “Mom” like he had any right to after what he’d done to her daughter, Shirley. He begged to take the photo overseas. She couldn’t deny him a minuscule comfort to distract from the jungle’s horrors. Months later, she received a package from Rashad. He had commissioned a cloth banner with what was supposed to be Keesha’s face stitched in the middle. Lizabeth had hung it up, but the photo didn’t look right. The baby’s skin was light, eyes slanted. It looked a bit like Shirley, but nothing like Keesha. Now eleven years old, Keesha hates it and begs her grandmother to take the eyesore down. Lizabeth recalls one night after Rashad came back from the war. Shirley, a mother of two by then, ran to her home in the night to escape his hard fists. He had followed her, and the warring lovers fell asleep on Lizabeth’s couch. In the morning, they woke late. The three of them sipped coffee at the breakfast table as Rashad talked about the war. He hadn’t seen combat, he said. He was a cook, and he sold drugs on the side. Before he had been dishonorably discharged, it was a good life. Lizabeth knew he was lying—she’d heard Shirley’s stories. Rashad had been in the thick of the violence before he got the kitchen post, and the battles had raged on in his mind ever since. Now, Lizabeth prepares for Sunday morning church service and waits for Shirley and the girls to pick her up. Lizabeth untacks the banner. She imagines the gnarled hands that made it, the old Vietnamese man who’d seen his own granddaughter in Keesha’s photograph and stitched a funhouse version of her face. She thinks of that old man from far away, of the granddaughter she knows now, her own daughter, and the son-in-law who won’t be with them when the car pulls up to the house.