Feeling special for the moment, Nola sang “Love Child,” and then she didn’t want to stop, so she sang “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” She knew lots of other songs from practicing with Mom, except that Mom rarely went on gigs anymore. Sometimes Mom ironed her hair and got a ride to a local bar, where she sang for tips, but most of the time she just relaxed on pillows of many colors and spoke about world peace and people loving one another. She smoked Kent cigarettes in a gold stick, which she held in her long, pale fingers. She’d also let Nola roll her cigarettes with the pot Dad brought home, and Nola would watch Mom suck in the smoke long and hard, her eyelids heavy, her eyelashes dark and curled like a movie star’s. Tonight’s visitors said Nola had the same green-colored eyes as Mom’s, but they didn’t say she was as beautiful. The cigarettes’ sweet smell gave Nola dreams although she wasn’t sleeping, and she wondered why the dreams had jumped the line instead of waiting their turn.

In the morning, she brushed Mom’s long wavy hair from its middle part and fanned it out on the Indians pillows, where light from a fringed lampshade was reflected in the hundreds of dime-size mirrors sewn onto the pillows. Mom also had a tie-dyed skirt decorated with these mini-mirrors, each stitched on with a different-colored thread, and Nola would wear it when she danced.

There was plenty of room to dance in their small cottage. Instead of real furniture, there were mattresses on the floor, two huge beanbag chairs, a bookshelf made of wood planks laid on cinder blocks, and stacks of fruit crates that held a large record collection and the stereo system. And lots of pillows all over the place.

Their house was the caretaker’s cottage on the estate of the big house, which Mom called a “mansion.” So it wasn’t really like poor people’s homes, except that nothing ever got fixed. Nola wished her parents would make it look nice so the other girls would be allowed to come and play, but when she had asked for living room furniture for her birthday like in other homes, Mom said that “Materialism is so bourgeois.”

Nola didn’t understand those big words that meant something not nice about the other girls’ parents, unlike her parents’ friends, who were “anti-establishment,” Mom said.

In a day or two, the visitors would go out to buy food, like cheese and cold cuts or canned peas and ravioli, because Mom never went shopping. But the guests didn’t know it yet, so Nola went to the big house, where plates were always ready in the refrigerator with sliced tomatoes or sprigs of parsley on top.