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ROXIE? WHAT WAS she thinking? She invented a nickname for herself on the spot, out of sheer panic, and now she was stuck with it.

Beulah had practiced her new name all the way from Manhattan: Roxanna Collins. Miss Collins. Roxanna. It needed to sound so familiar that she’d turn around instinctively every time she heard it. In the past she’d chosen tricky false names on a whim, and never could keep them straight. This one had to roll off the tongue.

Why, then, did she walk into that tent and spit out a brand-new nickname that she hadn’t once rehearsed?

Because rich girls have nicknames, that’s why. This occurred to her as soon as she found herself in the spotlight, standing with the tent flap draped around her shoulders and four pairs of questioning eyes upon her. Rich girls never use their full names. They’re never Margaret or Elizabeth or Beatrice. They’re Peggy and Lizzie and Sissy. Nonsensical names, names that Beulah wouldn’t inflict upon a cat, but that’s what they liked.

It’s nothing to panic over, she told herself. Just a last-minute adjustment. She’d get used to Roxie, and she wouldn’t mind if anyone called her Roxanna. “My mother always does,” she would say, with a lightness in her voice when she exhaled the word mother. Just gloss right over it, she told herself. Don’t bite down on that word. Let it all come out in one easy stream: My mother always does. Just like that.

She had to convince herself that she had an ordinary mother, and a father, too. Two polite, well-mannered people who sat together in a parlor in the evenings and smiled sweetly when their daughter walked into the room. If such people existed, Beulah had never known them, but now she had to conjure them, and place them firmly in her past, like nailing a picture to the wall.

Beulah had retreated so far into these thoughts that she’d failed to notice that her tent-mates were all watching her curiously. Instead of a trunk, she was dragging three enormous carpet bags stuffed with everything that Mrs. Pinkman’s maid had deposited in the train station locker. She would’ve left her belongings there and come back for them six weeks later, but the locker fee had only been paid through the end of the week. She couldn’t afford the storage, as she needed every penny for the train. Not just one train, but three, and a streetcar, and then a hack to carry her from Washington over to Chevy Chase. She never would’ve managed a trunk, but somehow she was able to lug three bags by slinging one over her right shoulder, carrying one in her right hand, and dragging the third one behind her.

“You must’ve brought a clean uniform for every day of the week,” said the youngest and prettiest of the three sisters, eyeing those overstuffed bags. Beulah hadn’t expected to share a tent with older women. Two of them were nearly forty, and one was in her mid-twenties. Only the little one, Fleurette, looked to be about twenty, the age Beulah was pretending to be.

“Oh, they can’t be serious about those uniforms,” Beulah said. “Five dollars for a khaki skirt and a jacket? It’s nonsense.” She saw her mistake immediately. What wealthy girl complains about the price of a plain-sewn skirt?

“I had my mother’s seamstress whip one up for me,” she added — lightly, carelessly, breathing right past that word mother — “but then wouldn’t you know, our girl forgot to pick it up from the seamstress. So I rummaged around in the back of my closet and found the oldest and most dreadful things I own. If any of these rags get dirty, it’ll only improve them.”

That didn’t get the sympathetic laugh Beulah had been trying for.

“I hope those rags are the regulation shade of khaki, because we start tomorrow morning with a uniform inspection,” said the sour-faced sister, Norma. She had the unflattering habit of tucking her chin down when she spoke, turning what was already a thick neck into a double or even triple roll of fat. She was one of those women who would have a trough of flesh around her neck when she was older.

“Tomorrow? Oh . . . well, I’m sure I can put something together.” Still Beulah didn’t open any of her bags. She hadn’t considered the fact that she’d have to unpack in front of all her tent-mates, who apparently had nothing better to do than to sit on their cots and watch her.

The eldest of the three sisters, Constance, was also the most fearsome of the trio. She was as tall as any man Beulah had ever met, and every bit as stout. She wore her hair up, in a style favored among women of Beulah’s grandmother’s generation: a flat bun, set just high enough on her head to fit under a hat, with the locks in front pinned loosely so they wouldn’t fall out of place. She spoke in a manner both forthright and commanding, her voice deep enough to convey some authority. She reminded Beulah of the ladies who used to patrol Monroe Square downtown, looking for wayward girls in need of correction.

But she showed surprising tenderness when she spoke to Beulah. “We couldn’t talk Fleurette out of bringing her sewing machine, and now I see why. I’m sure the two of you can put something together in the way of a uniform before morning.”

Tears came suddenly to Beulah’s eyes. At first, she couldn’t understand why. But as she submitted to Fleurette’s care, and allowed herself to be stripped down to her bloomers and turned this way and that, and to have her bags rummaged through and fabric draped over her, and pins put around her collar and a measuring tape run up her spine, Beulah felt unexpectedly welcomed, and cared for.

She was pulled suddenly back to the first time she’d ever turned up, unannounced, with all her possessions in a bag dragging the ground, hoping to be let in. Hoping to be welcomed.

It was only a dim memory, one she hadn’t allowed herself to revisit in years.

SHE COULDN’T HAVE been older than six. Claudia was ten: they’d only just celebrated her birthday a few days earlier. That was when they knew their mother was gone for good. If she had any intention of coming home, wouldn’t she have been there for Claudia’s birthday?

On the day that realization came to them, Claudia led her through Richmond’s muddy streets, past a fruit market and a butcher, past the horse stalls where the older boys played cards in the afternoon, up one unfamiliar, tree-lined lane and down another, until they came at last to their grandmother’s house.

It occurred to Beulah, as she thought back on it, that Claudia must’ve had no idea how to get there. She had simply marched them up and down every street, in an ever-expanding radius from the flat their mother rented, until at last they came to the front porch she recognized: the one with the dark red railings along the stairs, and the black iron boot scraper with the cutout of a racehorse above it.

There was a bell next to the front door, but Claudia had never rung it. Their mother always used to walk right in, calling out, “It’s your baby!” as the screen door rattled behind her. But that didn’t seem, to Claudia, like the right thing to do in this instance, so she stood uncomfortably on the front porch until Beulah grew impatient and rang the bell.

“Meemaw!” little Beulah called through the screen door. It was summer and the flies were fierce. Her grandmother was right to keep the screen door closed. They’d be all over her pies and her honey cakes, treats Beulah had come to expect and was eager to get her hands on.

Their grandmother was slow to come to the door. She was old, even for a grandmother, and whatever spirit she had in her had been broken in the last few years, when two of her older sons died, one right after the other. One of them was a stone cutter and he had an accident at work that Beulah wasn’t allowed to know about. The other died of coughing up blood. He was a grown man, older than Beulah’s mother, almost old enough to be a grandfather himself.

Meemaw took to her bed more often after she buried those sons. They were her fifth and sixth children to go into the grave, out of nine that had been born to her. She had also lost a husband, way back when she was young, and before she married Beulah’s grandfather. As hard as she tried to breathe life into the world, death kept beating it back.

She found the afternoons unbearable and preferred to sleep through them, except when Beulah and Claudia were expected. On those days the baking kept her busy for hours. Meemaw used to chide them over how quickly the honey cakes would be gone, how she spent all morning baking them and then they were devoured within minutes. But every time they came to visit, she made more, so she mustn’t have minded too much.

On that day, however, she hadn’t been baking. Beulah knew it because she couldn’t smell the burnt sugar through the screen door. Meemaw wasn’t dressed for company, either: she had her hair up in a pink kerchief of the kind that women of her generation wore to bed.

Beulah rushed to open the door and to bury her face into her grandmother’s apron, but Claudia held her back, having some idea that a negotiation should take place first.

“Mama went off on Tuesday,” Claudia said, believing it best to present the facts plainly and to let her grandmother make up her own mind about them.

Meemaw opened the screen door, the better to see them, but still neither of them crossed the threshold to the other. “Do you mean to say you’ve been without your mama for three days and three nights?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Claudia said.

Meemaw looked out over the tops of their heads at the neighbor lady across the street, who was pretending to fuss with her crape myrtles but was in fact watching them surreptitiously.

In a quieter voice meant only for them, she said, “And what about that daddy of yours?”

Claudia only shrugged. Beulah, watching her sister, shrugged as well. They’d hardly ever seen the man answering to that name. Beulah wouldn’t recognize him walking down the street.

Her grandmother pushed the screen door open a little wider and stepped aside. “You can come in, but you live here now. You understand? If your mama comes back, you won’t go with her. You’ll stay here with me and Poppa.”

Claudia looked down at Beulah, who was small for her age, and put a hand on top of her head the way their mother did sometimes.

“Yes, ma’am,” Claudia said, and that was all. Their grandmother swept them inside and pressed both of them up against her pillowy chest.

“You’re mine,” she whispered into their hair. “You’re my little girls.”

And they were. Their mother didn’t even come looking for them until eight or nine days had passed, and when she did come inside and saw the girls at their grandmother’s kitchen table, wearing new dresses that had been sewn just for them, in the same style that Meemaw had been making for little girls since the first one was born way back in 1851, she knew that her daughters wouldn’t be going back to live with her anymore. She didn’t even remark upon it, except to ask if they had all of their things, to which their grandmother replied that nothing the girls might’ve left back in that cheap old rented room was worth keeping anyhow.

She said the word rented as if it meant something worse, which it did.

FLEURETTE TUGGED TIGHT at the fabric around Beulah’s waist. Beulah hadn’t felt a seamstress’s strong, light fingers on her since those early days back in Richmond, when her grandmother made every stitch of clothing she wore.

“Did I stick you?” Fleurette asked when Beulah gasped.

“Not at all,” Beulah said, her eyes flying open. The lamp-lit interior of the tent swam back into view. “Just tickled, that’s all. Go ahead.”