She came and didn’t find the wallet.

I smiled.

She gasped, taking off her knitted cap. Golden curls fell across her face.

From then on she followed me everywhere. I was unable to steal. I spent day and night thinking about how to get rid of her. I learned that she had one living sibling, a younger sister, Grace. The Chinese servant who took care of the girls, Wang Ah-ma, had been with the family for a long time.

“ Pearl and Grace want so much to look like the Chinese girls,” Wang Ah-ma chatted to her knitting friends. They sat outside the house under the sun. Wang Ah-ma was making new caps for Pearl and Grace. The caps would cover their blonde hair so that they could look like Chinese girls. Wang Ah-ma said that she had to knit fast because the girls were wearing the old ones out. “Poor Pearl, every day she begs me to find a way to help her grow black hair.”

The women laughed. “What did you tell her?”

“I told her to eat black sesame seeds, and she went crazy eating them. Her mother thought that she was eating ants.”

Before the spring planting season, farmers came to town to purchase their supplies for the year. While men bought manure and had tools fixed and sharpened, women inspected the livestock. Going in and out of food stalls and supply shops, I hunted for stealing opportunities. It had been weeks since I’d had a full meal.

Papa had pawned nearly every piece of furniture we owned. The table and benches and my own bed were all gone. I now slept on a straw mat on the packed-earth floor. Centipedes crawled over my face in the middle of the night. NaiNai suffered from an infection that wouldn’t heal. She could barely move from the one bed we still owned. Papa spent more time with Absalom, trying to get hired.

“Absalom needs my help,” Papa said every day. “Absalom doesn’t know how to tell stories. He puts people to sleep. I ought to be the one to tell his Bible stories. I could turn Absalom’s business around.”