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This chapter is narrated from a third-person limited perspective and shadows Lily. Lily works in the Skylight Studio theater as a “seamstress/wardrobe,” which is a promotion from the cleaning job that she was hired to do (71). When the theater is forced to close, Lily has to go to work at Wang’s Heavenly Palace dry cleaners. She resents working in the dark, but with some effort and money left over from her parents, she is able to afford a house of her own. Lily is furious when a real estate agent tells her that her dream home is off-limits to nonwhite people. Nevertheless, when she’s less angry, she returns to the agent and rents a second-floor apartment on Jackson Street. Then she meets Frank, who brings his bundle of army-issue clothes for cleaning. When he comes to collect them, he walks Lily home, and she asks him if he wants to come up. In two weeks, they have become a couple. However, Frank’s domestic lassitude and his lack of enthusiasm for Lily’s goal of owning a house soon irk her. Moreover, Frank behaves erratically, and when he drops a plate of food in front of a crowd of people at a church convention, Lily is “alarmed and embarrassed” and pretends not to know him (77). Though she has some sympathy for Frank, realizing that he must be suffering from war trauma because of his experience in Korea, she cannot understand his changing moods. Meanwhile, Lily, who is gaining a reputation for her sewing skills and dreams of having her own dressmaking shop, takes her mind off him. 

When Frank announces that he is leaving to take care of his sick sister in Georgia and asks “to borrow all that money […] Lily’s disgust fought with relief and lost” (79). She is happy to have the apartment to herself, and the loneliness she had felt before Frank gives way to “a shiver of freedom” (80). The afternoon Frank leaves, Lily spots a leather purse filled with coins on the snowy sidewalk, and when no one is looking, she takes it. She spreads the coins on Frank’s empty side of the bed and feels that because “in Frank Money’s empty space real money glittered,” it is a sign of her coming prosperity (81).

Narrating the chapter in first person, Frank reflects how “Lotus, Georgia is the worst place in the world” because no one knows anything or wants to learn anything (83). There is nothing to do except “mindless work in fields you didn’t own, couldn’t own” (84). Were it not for his little sister, Cee, or his two best friends, he would have suffocated there by the age of 12, and he claims that “any kid who had a mind would lose it” (84). Frank concludes by saying that only the thought of his sister in trouble would bring him back to a place like Lotus.

This chapter is narrated in third-person and tells Lenore’s version of events. Lenore thinks that her current spouse, Salem Money, is useless compared to her first husband, who is shot to death at a gas station during the deepest part of the Depression by someone who envied him. After his death, she moves from Heartsville, Alabama, to Lotus, Georgia. Fearing living alone, she marries widower Salem Money. Just as Lenore begins to feel comfortable, Salem’s relatives “ragged and run out of their home” join them in the house (87). The howling baby girl, Cee, infuriates her the most, and when Lenore is asked to care for her, she is furious and accepts only because she can see that “the four-year-old brother was clearly the real mother to the infant” (88). Lenore believes that she is strict rather than cruel and that Cee is a hopeless case, being clumsy and having a short memory. 

Now that the children have long gone, Lenore experiences dizziness and relies upon Jackie, a 12-year-old neighborhood girl, to do certain chores for her. Profoundly lonely, Lenore also relies on Jackie for entertainment, but Jackie stops coming when Lenore beats her new puppy. Lenore’s loneliness provokes her to become incapacitated by a stroke, and the neighborhood women she once looked down upon are the ones who tend to her in her sickness.

Writing in first person, Frank talks about Korea, telling the narrator: “You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there”(93). 

Frank prefers the act of battle to all the hours spent waiting, listening for the enemy. One day, in the act of waiting, he hears “a crackling in the bamboo stands” and sees a child’s hand snatching through the soldiers’ garbage (94). The girl is so hungry that “anything not metal, glass, or paper was food to her” (95). The sight reminds Frank of himself and Cee as children, stealing peaches from Miss Robinson’s tree. The girl’s daily return is a welcome sight for Frank, and when his relief guard spots her, he smiles. The girl touches the guard’s crotch, which surprises him. Then, Frank says that he sees the guard shoot at the girl, blasting her face off. He concludes that the soldier shot the girl because he felt tempted by her.

The third-person narrator shadows Frank as he settles into his reclining seat on the train and feels ready to “release the haunting images always ready to dance before his eyes” (97). For example, witnessing the gruesome death of his best friend, Mike, changes Frank, giving “a grotesque life to his childhood” (98). Later, when his friend Stuff also dies, Frank is so traumatized that he sometimes lives as though his two friends are still alive: “If he heard a joke Mike would love, he would turn his head to tell it to him—then a nanosecond of embarrassment before realizing he wasn’t there” (99). He begins to rely on alcohol to disperse the memories of his lost friends.

However, on the train to Atlanta, Frank realizes that he is no longer crushed by his old memories. When the train breaks down outside Chattanooga and Frank gets off it, he buys a soda and passes by a place where two women are fighting. A big man, picking his teeth and watching, challenges Frank, shoving his chest twice. Frank drops his soda and fights back, getting a thrill with each blow he delivers. He keeps going even when the man is unconscious and the women are dragging him back by the collar. 

Then, Frank lopes off back to his train, excited by the “wild joy” this personal battle has given him because it is like the mindless, anonymous killing in Korea (102).