wrapped package in her hand. She glanced at Caroline's boxes in the corner, quickly handing Caro-line the present.
'It is very sweet of you to get me something,' Caro-line said, kissing Ma on the cheek to say thank you.
'It's very nothing,' Ma said, 'very nothing at all.'
Ma turned her face away as Caroline lifted the present out of the box. It was a black and gold silk teddy with a plunging neckline.
'At the store,' Ma said, 'I told them your age and how you would be having this type of a shower. A girl there said that this would make a good gift for such things. I hope it will be of use.'
'I like it very much,' Caroline said, replacing it in the box.
After Caroline went to bed, I went to Ma's room for one of our chats. I slipped under the covers next to her, the way Caroline and I had come to her and Papa when our dreams had frightened us.
'That was nice, the teddy you got for Caroline,' I said. 'But it doesn't seem much like your taste.'
'I can't live in this country twenty-five years and not have some of it rub off on me,' she said. 'When will I have to buy you one of those dishonorable things?'
'When you find me a man.'
'They can't be that hard to find,' she said. 'Look, your sister found one, and some people might think it would be harder for her. He is a retard, but that's okay.'
'He's not a retard, Ma. She found a man with a good heart.'
'Maybe.'
'You like him, Ma. I know deep inside you do.'
'After Caroline was born, your father and me, we were so afraid of this.'
'Of what?'
'Of what is happening.'
'And what is that?'
'Maybe she jumps at it because she thinks he is being noble. Maybe she thinks he is doing her a favor. Maybe she thinks he is the only man who will ever come along to marry her.'
'Maybe he loves her,' I said.
'Love cannot make horses fly,' she said. 'Caroline should not marry a man if that man wants to be noble by marrying Caroline.'
'We don't know that, Ma.'
'The heart is like a stone,' she said. 'We never know what it is in the middle.
'Only some hearts are like that,' I said.
'That is where we make mistakes,' she said. 'All hearts are stone until we melt, and then they turn back to stone again.'
'Did you feel that way when Papa married that woman?' I asked.
'My heart has a store of painful marks,' she said, 'and that is one of them.'
Ma got up from the bed and walked over to the closet with all her suitcases. She pulled out an old brown leather bag filled with tiny holes where the closet mice had nibbled at it over the years.
She laid the bag on her bed, taking out many of the items that she had first put in it years ago when she left Haiti to come to the United States to be reunited with my father.
She had cassettes and letters written by my father, his words crunched between the lines of aging sheets of ruled loose-leaf paper. In the letters he wrote from America to her while she was still in Haiti, he never talked to her about love. He asked about practical things; he asked about me and told her how much money he was sending her and how much was designated for what.
My mother also had the letters that she wrote back to him, telling him how much she loved him and how she hoped that they would be together soon.
That night Ma and I sat in her room with all those things around us. Things that we could neither throw away nor keep in plain sight.
Caroline seemed distant the night before her wedding. Ma made her a stew with spinach, yams, potatoes, and dumplings. Ma did not eat any of the stew, concentrating instead on a green salad, fishing beneath the lettuce leaves as though there was gold hidden on the plate.
After dinner, we sat around the kitchen radio listening to a music program on the Brooklyn Haitian station.
Ma's lips were moving almost unconsciously as she mouthed the words to an old sorrowful bolero. Ma was putting the final touches on her own gown for the wedding.
'Did you check your dress?' she asked Caroline.
'I know it fits,' Caroline said.
'When was the last time you tried it on?'
'Yesterday.'
'And you didn't let us see it on you? I could make some adjustments.'
'It fits, Ma. Believe me.'
'Go and put it on now,' Ma said.
'Maybe later.'
'Later will be tomorrow,' Ma said.
'I will try it on for you before I go to sleep,' Caroline promised.
Ma gave Caroline some ginger tea, adding two large spoonfuls of brown sugar to the cup.
'You can learn a few things from the sugarcane,' Ma said to Caroline. 'Remember that in your marriage.'
'I didn't think I would ever fall in love with anybody, much less have them marry me,' Caroline said, her fingernails tickling the back of Ma's neck.
'Tell me, how do these outside-of-church weddings work?' Ma asked.
'Ma, I told you my reasons for getting married this way,' Caroline said. 'Eric and I don't want to spend all the money we have on one silly night that everybody else will enjoy except us. We would rather do it this way. We have all our papers ready. Eric has a friend who is a judge. He will perform the ceremony for us in his office.'
'So much like America,' Ma said, shaking her head. 'Everything mechanical. When you were young, every time someone asked you what you wanted to do when you were all grown up, you said you wanted to marry Pele. What's happened to that dream?'
'Pele who?' Caroline grimaced.
'On the eve of your wedding day, you denounce him, but you wanted to marry him, the Brazilian soccer player, you always said when you were young that you wanted to marry him.'
I was the one who wanted to marry Pele. When I was a little girl, my entire notion of love was to marry the soccer star. I would confess it to Papa every time we watched a game together on television.
In our living room, the music was dying down as the radio station announced two A.M. Ma kept her head down as she added a few last stitches to her dress for the wedding.
'When you are pregnant,' Ma said to Caroline, 'give your body whatever it wants. You don't want your child to have port-wine marks from your cravings.'
Caroline went to our room and came back wearing her wedding dress
Ma's eyes wandered between the bare knees poking beneath the dress and the device attached to Caroline's forearm.
'I went out today and got myself a wedding present,' Caroline said. It was a robotic arm with two shoulder straps that controlled the motion of the plastic fingers.
'Lately, I've been having this shooting pain in my stub and it feels like my arm is hurting,' Caroline said.
'It does not look very real,' Ma said.
'That's not the point, Ma!' Caroline snapped.
'I don't understand,' Ma said.
'I often feel a shooting pain at the end of my left arm, always as though it was cut from me yesterday. The doc-tor said I have phantom pain.'
'What? The pain of ghosts?'
'Phantom limb pain,' Caroline explained, 'a kind of pain that people feel after they've had their arms or legs
