I told Momma about Daddy today. How I brought him to our old place after the cops hit him. But I didn’t say the part about all us going to the park looking for him. I waited for her to get mad. She didn’t. She just put some more home fries on my plate and squeezed ketchup on top of my eggs. Then she said she’d talk to me about it later.

It’s almost suppertime now, and Momma still ain’t mentioned our talk from this morning. We sitting on the front porch swing— that Dr. Mitchell gave us—watching people working in their yards, or walking their dogs. Momma’s toes pat the porch and push us off again when the swing slows down. She says she heard me the last few nights, tossing and turning for hours. She wanna know if that’s ’cause we only been in our new place a week, or ’cause my mind is busy with things a girl my age shouldn’t have to worry ’bout.

“I’m fine,” I say, keeping my mouth shut about the dreams I have at night. Crazy ones, with Zora, Miz Evelyn, and Daddy all coming at me with their hands out. “You think I’m like him, Momma?”

She stops the swing from moving. But doesn’t say a word. I put my legs across hers. “He don’t care how he treat people, Momma. No matter how good they are to him.” Momma changes the subject. Asks me what’s going on between me and Zora. I can’t look her in the eyes. So I put my feet back on the ground and push. “Nothing,” I say.

She asks if this thing between Zora and me got anything to do with money. My eyes get big.

She stops the swing, and cuts the porch light on, ’cause it’s dark out now. “Did you borrow and not pay her back, or take what wasn’t yours?”

I stand up, and the swing almost tips Momma over. “Sorry.”

Momma’s mind won’t stay put. Now she’s talking ’bout Daddy again. Saying how the dope makes him not care for nobody but hisself. “When he’s on it, he’ll steal the shoes off your feet, or the light out your eye.”

I think about him stealing her fur coat long ago, and taking money off me. “How you do that to people you know?” I think to myself. But I done it. To Zora and Miz Evelyn, so it’s easy, I guess.

Momma holds my chin, while she stares into my eyes and tells me that I got Daddy’s freckles and hair, but I ain’t exactly like him. “Not yet.” When she says them last two words, she stares extra hard at me. Like maybe she’s trying to see if I’m more like Daddy than she knows. “Answer me,” she says, pressing hard on my chin. “Did you take money from Zora?”

My eyes look at Momma’s smooth, pretty brown skin. They move over her long eyelashes and thick, red lips. “No. Zora’s just jealous ’cause she don’t want me and you ’round Dr. Mitchell.”

I can tell that Momma don’t believe me. Every word she’s saying now is louder than the one before. By the time she’s done telling me that we starting fresh here—“Not dragging our old ways with us like burnt pots that need to be trashed”—the woman next door is up on her feet, looking down her nose at us.

Momma asks me again what I did to Zora. I wanna ask her how come she cares so much about Zora and ain’t worried ’bout me? Then she leans over and picks a ladybug out my hair.

“Nothing bad ever happens to Zora.”

Momma blows and the ladybug flies away.

“Daddy steals off me and don’t have no shoes, and Zora gets to go to London.”

The moon is out now. It’s full and clear and shining so bright it feels like God’s pointing a flashlight at me.

“Do you want something bad to happen to Zora?” Momma asks.

I think a minute. Then I say what I really want to say. “Sometimes. Sometimes I wish . . . bad stuff would happen to her . . . just so she wouldn’t . . .”

Momma finishes my sentence. “Have it so good?”

I catch the ladybug with my hand. “No. Yeah, I guess.”

Momma reminds me that if bad things happen to Zora, they happen to Dr. Mitchell and Zora’s mother, too. Just like when Daddy went on dope and lost his job, it was me and Momma who ended up on the street first.

I tell Momma that I don’t want nothing bad to happen to Dr. Mitchell.

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to you or Zora,” she says.

We go to the back of the house. Watch how the moon makes the red roses look orange and the white flowers look lemon yellow. My eyes are closed. I breathe in the sweetness. Momma says her head aches, and just as quick, she tells me that I’m on punishment.

“He made me let him in the house,” I say.

She bends down and snaps a dead flower off its stem. And in a voice as soft as the lamb’s ear she planted yesterday, she says that she can’t trust me no more. That I lie and sneak around like . . .

She don’t finish her sentence. I don’t look her way. But I hear the hurt in her voice when she says, “You can do better. Shiketa can do better. Your father too. Y’all just have to wanna do better.”

I’m waiting for Momma to yell at me. To maybe go back inside and nail up the windows, or run in my room and empty my money out the window like she did when we lived in the projects. She don’t move. She smells the flowers and acts like I’m not even here.