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just showed up one day, and we kept him, and I named him Milk Whiskers.”
    She shook her head. “And where is Mr. Whiskers going to live when you come back home? You know we can’t have a cat.”
    “Milk Whiskers. He’s going to stay here. He’s our cat.” Mother watched the cat bat at a june bug in the grass. “I don’t know why, but I just never had any use for cats.”
    Once, when I was four and Mother and Daddy were still living together more often than they lived apart, the luxury of two incomes emboldened her to hire a cook who also watched me during the day. All I remember from that interlude was the sugar and butter sandwiches the cook prepared for me, my inability to fall asleep when she made me take a nap every afternoon and the intense suspense of waiting late every afternoon with my head on the armrest of the sofa closest to the front door, where I could stare at the parking lot in front of the apartments, waiting for a sight of the big green Plymouth to turn in, which was my signal to bolt through the screen door—it was the one time all day when Igot away with slamming that door—and dashing up the sidewalk to hurl myself into my mother’s arms.
    Catherine, the cook, didn’t last long. After her abrupt departure, my mother interrogated me.
    “Have you been telling stories?”
    “No’m.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes’m,” I said, sounding entirely too tentative. To my everlasting confusion, my mother employed an overlapping lexicon devoted to the subject of lying. There were fibs, white lies, stories and outright lies. Fibs and white lies were minor sins, lies were the worst, and stories could be either. To further confuse the issue, the accused, usually me, could be conflated with his sin: “You’re a lie.” Even candor fell under the heading of lying in my mother’s eyes. When I told a lady in my uncle’s church, “Ooh, Miss Agnes, you sure are fat,” a fact often spoken of in our household, I was accused of making up stories.
    “That’s not what Catherine said.”
    I was stumped. I liked Catherine, except when she made me take a nap (especially after the nap that earned me a whipping from my mother, who was furious when she found I’d eaten two rows of chenille buttons off the bedspread one especially sleepless afternoon: I had been a rabbit and the bedspread was a cabbage patch). “I didn’t tell a lie.”
    “So why did you say that I didn’t like her cooking?” Then I remembered. It was a week or so before. Catherine had tried to get me to eat congealed salad, and I put up a fight that ended with my saying that my mother didn’t like Catherine’s cooking either.
    “She said she quit because she didn’t want to work for anyonewho didn’t like what she did. She said you said I didn’t like her cooking.”
    “I heard you tell Daddy.”
    “Honey, I never did any such thing.”
    “You said she put too much salt in the butter beans.”
    “Oh well, that. That’s not the same thing.”
    “You said she was no Tina.”
    “Honey, Tina was a treasure. Mama used to say she’d never seen a better cook. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think Catherine could cook, too.”
    “Can’t you tell her that?”
    “Oh, it’s too late for that. Nigras today are just sensitive as they can be about every little thing. Catherine was one of those touchy ones. You’ve run her off for good.”
    “I didn’t mean it.”
    “I just hope we’ve learned a lesson from this. You have to be very careful what you say to people. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, do you?”
    “No’m.”
    “You know how you’ve been working on talking too loud? Well, now I want you to work on being quiet and being very careful about what you say to people. Don’t always say everything you know. Have I ever told you how quiet my daddy was? He was very reserved at all times. I wish you could have known him.”
    “Yes’m.” I relaxed a little, knowing now that I wasn’t going to get a