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container the coffee was in; we’d used my plain lunch-box thermos because we couldn’t find the more elegant silver one we used on car trips. “I don’t see it anywhere,” my mother had said, her voice muffled because her head was stuck far inside one of the lower cabinets. Then, emerging and using her fingers to fluff back her mussed-up hair, “It’s too big anyway. She wouldn’t know what to do with all that coffee.”
    “We could have some with her,” I’d said, and earned a sharp poke in the ribs from Sharla.
    “You girls don’t drink coffee,” my mother had said, her lips a prim straight line. “Not until you are twenty-one.”
    Well, not in front of her. But we drank coffee all right, every chance we got. Once, when our parents went out, we made and drank a whole pot. “Look how much it makes me
pee!
” Sharla had yelled in her hepped-up voice from behind the closed bathroom door. And I, waiting desperately for my own turn, had yelled back, “I
know!
”
    Every night after supper, when we did the dishes, Sharla and I finished the coffee that was left in our parents’ cups. We fought silently over who got my mother’s—she used more sugar. We never simply added sugar ourselves; I think we believed it would be pressing our luck. Suppose one of our parents walked in when we were stirring? My father would sit us down at the kitchen table for one of his low-voiced lectures about age-appropriate activities and then impose some irritating punishment like early bedtimes for a week, mostly for the benefit of our mother. She tended to enlarge small crimes and to take them personally. After we’d misbehaved, she would sit in the living room in her small blue velvet chair, looking out the window and periodically shaking her head. The day she caught us chicken-calling a teacher we particularly disliked, she actually wept a little.
“Mom!
” Sharla had said, and my mother had waved her hand in pouty dismissal. “You have no idea what this suggests about your upbringing,” she told us. “No idea.” We were made to call and apologize, while my mother stood nearby, supervising. Sharla went first, as usual, leaving me to cast about for something to say that was not too close to her apology. In the end, however, I copied her exactly. “Sorry, we didn’t really mean anything by it,” I said.
    “Oh, I know you didn’t,” Mrs. Mennafee said. “As I just told your sister, I used to make calls like that myself.”I had a thought to ask her to tell that to my mother, but instead I went with Sharla to sit for forty-five minutes in our bedroom, part two of our punishment. It wasn’t awful; I was in need of a nap anyway. We got out in time to watch
The Mickey Mouse Club
, a vast relief since I was in love with Jimmy. My only chance to get him was to communicate telepathically. I stared at his wavy, black-and-white image, saying over and over in my mind, “I love you; I am ready.” Sharla favored the goofy boys, with their too-big teeth; I knew a real man when I saw one, Jimmy’s mouse ears notwithstanding.
    Jasmine bent to accept the thermos of coffee from Sharla, and I smelled her perfume. I found it extraordinary that someone would wear perfume in the middle of the day, and on moving day besides. Once, in Monroe’s department store, I’d seen a small container of Chanel No. 5 that was called “purse size,” but I’d thought it was a kind of joke. Who would carry perfume in their purse? Here was someone who would.
    “Come on in,” Jasmine said, and we followed her into the house. There were boxes everywhere, but she went without hesitation to one in the dining room, stripped the tape from it, reached in and pulled out one cup, then two more. She spaced them evenly on top of a smaller box, sat on the floor beside it, and then looked up at us expectantly.
    “We don’t drink coffee,” I said, and was elbowed again.
    “No?” Her black eyebrows were raised into pretty arches.
    “We do sometimes,”