“But Mama if you put that stuff on my hair, then it combs through.  And you can braid my hair.  You cain’t braid Jeannette’s hair unless you put that stuff in it.”

            “Anne, I’m sorry.  That’s just the way it is.”

            Looking down on the girls, she saw Jeannette lying on the ground.  Anne was too scared of messing up her hair. Jeannette was full of the sweet ripeness with the echo of bedsprings in the back. In a realm of black-and-white words, their mother saw the ugliness of the world every time her girls came in.  Every disappointment felt like seaweed in her bathwater. Not even the mildewy smell in the basement could get her to leave that window.  A real punishment involved moving beyond the kitchen or when her daughters would not come right when she called them and she had to walk near the stairs.

            Her bathwater was beginning to steam, so she closed her bedroom door. The windows began to fog.  She drew a heart with an arrow through it, the same heart that had given Jeannette the itch. Unbeknownst to her, at the exact identical moment that she drew the arrow, Antonio was poised to shoot his BB.  Anne’s heart skipped a beat when she saw the heavy leather strap fall to the crook of his arm. 

            “Go, Antonio, Go,” said Samson.

“No, Antonio, no,’ said Jeannette. 

Antonio opened the same leather pouch that his grandfather gave him, and pulled out a pellet. His finger curled under the cocking lever and pulled back. Add

something here.    

            Samson thought at that moment about a vision he had. His father had his back turned and he was facing the front door.  The suitcase in his right hand was stamped Mexico, and he was blindfolded.  His mother was standing in the kitchen, also blindfolded with a suitcase.  Greater than the need for mothering or fathering was the need to say something.  A kind of smiling complex in memory but filled with the patient expression of a wrinkled face. Through the reflection of the hallway mirror, he could see the blue-and-black expression on his face and he went to say something, but nothing came out.  A big blockage lodged in his throat, sound and round like cotton candy, prevented him from saying anything else.  Tears came down his face like snowballs down a mountain, and somewhere inside of him, a voice said, “I must be valuable after all.”