“Go and wash your hands,” Sharon ordered the children.

My mother intercepted them.

“You don’ need to go ’cross de whole house. Dip in de swimmin’ pool! Jus’ dip, dat’s ’nough.”

Everyone was sitting around the picnic table of our patio when I brought the silver dome on a platter. My mother straightened her back and lifted her chin an inch; she presided at the head of the table; on backless bench to her right, sat Joseph, Sharon, Rosa and Lucy Minsky; on the bench to her left, Tommy and Timmy Tatta, Cecilia, and the empty space for me. Tommy was busy mashing his baked potato and Timmy was picking the skin of a broken sun blister off his shoulder. Sharon and Joseph smiled at me so sweetly, that it was like a magnetic force that made the corners of my mouth yield upwards, too.

“What is it?” asked Lucy.

“Not the Easter bunny again, I hope,” I heard Rosa whisper under Sharon’s loud, “Shh!”

Sharon opened her paper napkin which my mother had cut in two; it fell apart into two squares so thin, the ceiling fan, even at the lowest speed, forced her to cross her legs to hold them in place.

“Wha’ you waitin’ for?!”

When my mother’s juices began to flow, she could become aggressive. I should have crawled under my bed, but instead I lifted the dome. One burnt stone crab lay on its back upon the silver platter.

“Where are de ot’hers?!”

“Home …” was all I managed to pronounce. I hadn’t a drop of saliva left in my mouth.

“You! Where, home?! De kitchen?” She stood up. “Do you hear me?!”

If I did, I couldn’t any more because I had just received a smack on my ear hard enough to make it ring. Lucy and Rosa lowered their heads on the table and began to cry, not because there was nothing to eat, but because I had been hit. Cecilia used to cry, too, but she was used to it by now. Their sobs gave me courage and I found myself screaming at the top of my voice, “Home in the canal!” several times on end.

This somehow calmed my mother who sat back down and let her arms hang limply off her lawn chair, as though her jewelry had really been stolen, for once. Sharon hadn’t spoken yet but looked back and forth as though she were watching a table tennis match with equal sympathy for both Chinese players. Joseph kept his eyes down on his baked potato, and poked holes in the aluminum paper.

“It doesn’t matter, Olga, ah, poor thing, I know how she feels, the little darling …”

I could tell Sharon’s words had no effect whatsoever in softening my mother. Human kindness to her was equivalent to stupidity. When volunteers came to the door to collect, my mother was already in mid-calculation: she took a walk around the block anyway, so if she could earn a few dollars a night in doing so … It is very painful for me to admit that my mother helped herself to the handsomest bills in the American Cancer Society and Multiple Sclerosis cans she toted around. Some community members put their bills in envelopes. These were opened with the steam of a consommé de homard or beef broth, one dollar put in their place, and closed. My mother said the organizations were crooks and only ten percent made it to the sick or handicapped. Like the food chain, she felt somewhere along the line, she deserved her piece of the pie.