Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux

      Esther’s mama was tall and thin, an elongated version of Esther. Her skin was a deeper brown, though, and her hair was the color of mine, but she had the same angular face shape as Esther, and the same hard black eyes peering out at the world defiantly.

      “Careful of my dress,” she said to Esther as we slid into the backseat of the cab beside her.

      Esther, sitting in the middle, pushed against me so hard that I ended up with my arm pressed against the cool, sturdy metal door handle during the long ride to a side of town that I had never visited.

      Esther’s mama talked to her in short little sentences. Her words, her tone, her questions all seemed unnatural for someone who was a mother. Mothers were authoritative with kids, always sure of their motherly power. They asked the right questions and were economical with the words they used on children. Economical was different from stingy, which is how Esther’s mother spoke, as if each word became lost to her forever. And she behaved with a stiff discomfort that signaled fear, the kind of fear that children, like wild animals, can sense. That kind of fear usually incited wildness in us, but I sensed fear in Esther too. Her fear made me scared, because as far as I could tell, Esther wasn’t scared of anything—except, it seemed, her mother.

      To manage my uneasiness, I stared out the window as my shabby neighborhood was replaced by a neater one with cement sidewalks and small painted houses with screened-in porches. Some of the yards had manicured lawns and tidy flowers or hedges, unlike the bare, parched yards and ditches in the Quarters.

      Esther’s mama’s house was white and had square hedges and yellow and purple flowers out front. Inside the house, her rooms were laid out in the same shotgun design as ours, though she had four inside rooms instead of the three that my family shared. The furniture looked new. Everything matched and was stylishly arranged like on a television show, and though it was Friday, she made a Sunday supper of pork chops and gravy, mashed potatoes, and English peas, and there was a mulberry cobbler. She even had paper napkins on the table.

      Through supper and the three hours we spent in front of the small, round black and white television set, Esther used words like please and thank you. Words I had never heard cross her lips. She sat straight-backed on the sofa wearing the pink frilly dress that her grandma had insisted on, looking unnatural with her hands folded in her lap and her hair pulled back and braided into two plaits that hung heavily to her shoulders. Her scarred legs and bony elbows were shiny from the grease her grandma had rubbed onto them. I was also a model child, wearing my Sunday best and my favorite plaited hairstyle.

      Esther’s mama made us a pallet of blankets and quilts to sleep on the floor in one of the middle rooms. Esther and I lay whispering together in the dark until the soft sounds of her mother’s snoring floated in from the other room. Esther got up and began to rummage around, striking matches from the box she had sneaked from her grandma’s kitchen. She peeked in boxes and dresser drawers and looked under furniture. This was the bold, curious Esther I was used to. She wanted to see how her mother lived, she said.

      “Look what I found,” she whispered, coming back to the pallet with a small bottle in her hand. In the shadowy light of a match’s flame, I saw that it was a bottle of pink nail polish. She turned the bottle slowly so the light glistened off the smooth glass as if it were a jewel. My mama didn’t use the stuff, but I thought it was pretty on the ladies I saw wearing it. “Let’s paint our nails,” Esther suggested.

      Little alarm bells sounded in my head. “Shouldn’t we wait and ask and do it tomorrow?” It wasn’t right. It was just like stealing to use the polish without permission. And besides, how would we hide it from her mama the next day?

      “This is my mama’s house. I can use anything I want.” The irritated pitch of her voice reminded me that she had no tolerance for other people’s fear. “Anyway, I’m sure she left it here for me to use,” she said and smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth making a sound that until now I had only heard grown-up women make.

      I held my breath, afraid to implicate myself with even a sigh. Agreeing with her was out of the question. Something about her mother frightened me. She was not governed by the laws of other mothers. I could not tell what governed her.

      “Well, go ahead, be a chicken. I’ll just paint my own then,” Esther hissed at me in the darkness.

      And she did, carefully, methodically, while I lit one match after another and held it steady for her. When she was done, she lay back on the pallet and waved her hands in the darkness. I lay there wondering about Esther and her mama.

      Esther sat up and struck another match. She held the nail polish aloft and examined the bottle from every angle. “I wonder if this stuff burns,” she said quietly.

      “How could it?” I answered. “It’s wet. Wet things don’t burn.”

      “I bet it does.”

      A new anxiety laid claim to me as I watched Esther’s ghostly face wavering in the light of the match. Her eyes were dark holes in her face.

      “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I wanted her to let go of this idea, to move on to something harmless.

      “I don’t think you should do this,” I whispered. My anxiety was growing into a complicated fear. She turned away from me. “Esther, this is bad.”

      “No it ain’t. Want to know something? I bet you that if we put a piece of string in this bottle it will burn just like a little bitty coal-oil lamp. Then we won’t have to keep striking matches. What you want to bet me?”

      “Nothing. What we need to see for? It’s time to go to sleep.”

      But Esther was already hunting around the room for a suitable wick.

      “My mama took me to a beauty parlor once and got my hair done up like Shirley Temple’s,” I tried again, lying as I watched her stuff a small rag into the mouth of the bottle.

      “You ever had your hair done like Shirley Temple’s?”

      “No,” she shot back, not even glancing my way as she struck a match and held it to the end of the rag. She set the bottle down and smiled as a small yellow flame grabbed the end of the rag and moved toward the neck of the bottle. As the rag shortened, the flame sputtered and became blue. Then it disappeared into the mouth of the bottle and a pungent, sweet smell rose from the bottle in a stream of thick gray smoke with a pale bluish tint at its base.

      We looked at each other in the pale gray-blue light as the smoke filled the room. It was clear that something had to be done, but neither of us knew what.

      I had a sudden vision of the house smoldering silently in a pale blue flame, with the scent of burning nail polish invading the neighborhood.

      “What the hell!” Esther’s mama was outlined in the smoke that filled the doorway. “What the hell have you done?” She rushed into the center of the room, stepping on my arm. She pulled the chain and turned on the single lightbulb hanging from its cord in the ceiling. She gawked at the nail polish bottle smoldering in the center of the floor like a tiny volcano, then grabbed a hand-mirror and hairbrush from the dresser. She squatted beside the smoking bottle, brushed it onto the face of the mirror, stood, and rushed from the room. We heard her cursing and swearing as