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argue with it. When she felt the tears coming up, building like a great hard pressure inside her, hot, so hot she thought they would burn, she swallowed them down deeper and deeper until they became a hard little stone in her chest. She learned to look back at her tormentors and smile with cold arrogance and disdain. She learned to pretend nothing they said could touch her. And sometimes she convinced herself nothing did.
    The winter Sarah was eight, Mama became ill. She didn’t want a doctor.
    She said all she needed was rest. But she kept getting worse, her breathing more labored. “Take care of my little girl, Rab,” Mama said. She smiled the way she had long ago.
    She died in the morning, the first sunlight of spring on her face and her rosary beads in her dead-white hands. Rab wept violently, but Sarah had no tears. The heaviness inside her seemed almost too great to bear. When Rab went out for a while, she lay down beside Mama and put her arms around her.
    Mama was so cold and stiff. Sarah wanted to warm her. Sarah’s eyes felt gritty and hot. She closed them and whispered over and over, “Wake up, Mama. Wake up. Please, wake up.” When she didn’t, Sarah couldn’t stop the tears. “I want to go with you. Take me, too. God, please, I want to go with my mama.” She wept until exhaustion overtook her and only awakened when Rab lifted her away from the bed. Men were with him.
    Sarah saw they meant to handle Mama and she screamed at them to 35
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    leave her alone. Rab held her tight, almost smothering her in his foul-smelling shirt, while the others began wrapping Mama in a sheet. Sarah went silent when she saw what they had done. Rab let her go, and she sat down hard on the floor and didn’t move.
    The men talked as though she weren’t there. Maybe she wasn’t anymore.
    Maybe she was different, the way Mama once said.
    “I bet Mae was real pretty once,” one said as he began sewing the shroud closed over Mama’s face.
    “She’s better off dead,” Rab said, crying again. “At least now she’s not unhappy. She’s free.”
    Free, Sarah thought. Free of me. If I hadn’t been born, Mama would live in a nice cottage in the country with flowers all around. Mama would be happy. Mama would be alive.
    “Wait a minute,” said one, and pried the rosary from Mama’s fingers and dropped it in Sarah’s lap. “I bet she woulda wanted you to have that, honey.”
    He finished the stitching while Sarah ran the beads through her cold fingers and stared at nothing.
    They all went away, Mama with them. Sarah sat alone for a long time wondering if Rab would keep his promise to take care of her. When night came and he didn’t come back, Sarah went down to the docks and flung the rosary into a garbage scow. “What good are you?” she cried out to the heavens.
    No answer came.
    She remembered Mama’s going to the big church and talking to the man in black. He talked a long time, and Mama had listened, her head bowed, tears running down her cheeks. Mama never went back, but sometimes she would still sift the beads through her slender fingers while the rain spat on the window.
    “What good are you?!” Sarah screamed again. “Tell me!” A sailor looked at her oddly as he passed by.
    Rab didn’t come back for two days and when he did, he was so drunk he didn’t remember who she was. She sat cross-legged with her back to the fire, looking at him. He was maudlin, sloppy tears running down his bearded cheeks. Every time he raised the half-empty bottle by its neck, she watched 36
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    his Adam’s apple bob. After a while, he fell over and snored, the rest of the whiskey running through the cracks in the floor. Sarah put the blanket over him and sat beside him. “It’s all right, Rab. I’ll take care of you now.” She couldn’t do it the way Mama did, but she would find