Claudine arrived in pale lavender. Maw admired Claudine’s red hair, the Irish in her still new and glistening, not tarnished to the ashen pewter sadness of most of Lynchburg’s white people. Claudine had no tarnish yet. She was young and new. Maw knew the penny had fallen into the muck, but she could retrieve it yet, and burnish it to orange on her hem. For three months the two of them would lean together, grey hair mingling with the red, engulfed in grins at the titillating jokes Claudine would tell after her laudanum—the exploits of a woman in Richmond, a European woman whose fingernails were long as garter snakes, who wore six red lacquer sticks in her hair—like this! And Claudine stuck young firm beans into Maw’s dirty bun. The woman had lovers and didn’t marry, not a one of them: at Maw’s age of forty she took in a boy not over fifteen and offered no excuses. She gave dinner parties and sprayed rose perfume onto the plates to give the chicken taste. Maw listened with ears pricked up eager as baby corn.