Krik? Krak!

cows.'

Caroline brushed aside a strand of her hair, chemically straightened and streaked bright copper from a peroxide experiment.

'You think you are so American,' Ma said to Caro-line. 'You don't know what's good for you. You have no taste buds. A double tragedy.'

'There's another American citizen in the family now.' I took advantage of the moment to tell Caroline.

'Congratulations,' she said. 'I don't love you any less.'

Caroline had been born in America, something that she very much took for granted.

Later that night, Ma called me into her bedroom after she thought Caroline had gone to sleep. The room was still decorated just the way it had been when Papa was still alive. There was a large bed, almost four feet tall, facing an old reddish brown dresser where we could see our reflections in a mirror as we talked.

Ma's bedroom closet was spilling over with old suit-cases, some of which she had brought with her when she left Haiti almost twenty-five years before. They were so crowded into the small space that the closet door would never stay fully closed.

'She drank all her soup,' Ma said as she undressed for bed. 'She talks bad about the soup but she drinks it.'

'Caroline is not a child, Ma.'

'She doesn't have to drink it.'

'She wants to make you happy in any small way she can.'

'If she wanted to make me happy, you know what she would do.'

'She has the right to choose who she wants to marry. That's none of our business.'

'I am afraid she will never find a nice man to marry her,' Ma said. 'I am afraid you won't either.'

'Caroline is already marrying a nice man,' I said.

'She will never find someone Haitian,' she said.

'It's not the end of creation that she's not marrying someone Haitian.'

'No one in our family has ever married outside,' she said. 'There has to be a cause for everything.'

'What's the cause of you having said what you just said? You know about Eric. You can't try to pretend that he's not there.'

'She is my last child. There is still a piece of her in-side me.'

'Why don't you give her a spanking?' I joked.

'My mother used to spank me when I was older than you,' she said. 'Do you know how your father came to have me as his wife? His father wrote a letter to my father and came to my house on a Sunday afternoon and brought the letter in a pink and green handkerchief. Pink because it is the color of romance and green for hope that it might work. Your grandfather on your papa's side had the handkerchief sewn especially in these two colors to wrap my proposal letter in. He brought this letter to my house and handed it to my father. My father didn't even read the letter himself. He called in a neighbor and asked the neighbor to read it out loud.

'The letter said in very fancy words how much your father wanted to be my husband. My son desires greatly your daughter's hand, something like that. The whole time the letter was being read, your father and I sat silently while our parents had this type of show. Then my father sent your father away, saying that he and my mother wanted to think about the proposal.'

'Did they consult you about it?' I asked, pretending not to know the outcome.

'Of course they did. I had to act like I didn't really like your father or that at least I liked him just a tiny little bit. My parents asked me if I wanted to marry him and I said I wouldn't mind, but they could tell from my face that it was a different story, that I was already desperately in love.'

'But you and Papa had talked about this, right? Before his father came to your father.'

'Your father and I had talked about it. We were what you girls call dating. He would come to my house and I would go to his house when his mother was there. We would go to the cinema together, but the proposal, it was all very formal, and sometimes, in some circumstances, formality is important.'

'What would you have done if your father had said no?' I asked.

'Don't say that you will never dine with the devil if you have a daughter,' she said. 'You never know what she will bring. My mother and father, they knew that too.'

'What would you have done if your father had said no?' I repeated.

'I probably would have married anyway,' she said. 'There is little others can do to keep us from our hearts' desires.'

Caroline too was going to get married whether Ma wanted her to or not. That night, maybe for the first time, I saw a hint of this realization in Ma's face. As she raised her comforter and slipped under the sheets, she looked as if she were all alone in the world, as lonely as a woman with two grown daughters could be.

'We're not like birds,' she said, her head sinking into the pillow. 'We don't just kick our children out of our nests.'

Caroline was still awake when I returned to our room.

'Is she ever going to get tired of telling that story?' she asked.

'You're talking about a woman who has had soup with cow bones in it for all sixty years of her life. She doesn't get tired of things. What are you going to do about it?'

'She'll come around. She has to,' Caroline said.

We sat facing each other in the dark, playing a free-association game that Ma had taught us when we were girls.

'Who are you?' Caroline asked me.

'I am the lost child of the night.'

'Where do you come from?'

'I come from the inside of the lost stone.'

'Where are your eyes?'

'I have eyes lost behind my head, where they can best protect me.'

'Who is your mother?'

'She who is the lost mother of all.'

'Who is your father?'

'He who is the lost father of all.'

Sometimes we would play half the night, coming up with endless possibilities for questions and answers, only repeating the key word in every sentence. Ma too had learned this game when she was a girl. Her mother belonged to a secret women's society in Ville Rose, where the women had to question each other before entering one another's houses. Many nights while her mother was hosting the late-night meetings, Ma would fall asleep listening to the women's voices.

'I just remembered. There is a Mass Sunday at Saint Agnes for a dead refugee woman.' Ma was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. 'Maybe you two will come with me.'

'Nobody sleeps in this house,' Caroline said.

I would go, but not her.

They all tend to be similar, farewell ceremonies to the dead. The church was nearly empty, with a few middle- aged women scattered in the pews.

I crossed myself as I faced the wooden life-size statue of a dying Christ, looking down on us from high above the altar. The chapel was dim except for a few high chandeliers and the permanent glow of the rich hues of the stained glass windows. Ma kneeled in one of the side pews. She clutched her rosary and recited her Hail Marys with her eyes tightly shut.

For a long time, services at Saint Agnes have been tailored to fit the needs of the Haitian community. A line of altar boys proceeded down the aisle, each carrying a long lit candle. Ma watched them as though she were a spectator at a parade. Behind us, a group of women was carrying on a conversation, criticizing a neighbor's wife who, upon leaving Haiti, had turned from a sweet Haitian wife into a self-willed tyrant.

'In New York, women give their eight hours to the white man,' one of the worshipers said in the poor woman's