Barbara
I begged until my mother allowed me to go
home
with Barbara, but not to stay overnight.
When we dropped from the school bus, Barbara’s
house—
not the big house with columns, no, not there,
but the unpainted shingle shack behind.
She got a cold ear of corn from the ice
box
and offered it. The door shut gray.
Here’s where we would have slept, she
said,
pointing to a bruised bed with a thin
blanket.
All of us together. Five sisters and
Barbara and me.
Until supper, we wandered the estate—
barns, sheds, silos, fields, mud, runnels,
streams—
until she lost her Goody hair barrette—a
little thing.
We searched and walked, slopped and searched
and all the time she wept and wept.
I could not stop her weeping.
I said, Ask your mother to buy another,
but she just shook her head.
We were second-graders. I did not know
the price of things.
I thought of Barbara again when my
son-in-law
left my daughter with a baby and a
two-year-old
to sleep in another’s bed. Her weeping. I
thought about all
that could not be covered, could not be replaced.