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leg, waving and roaring on command. Throughout the performance, Momma heard complaints from the officers’ wives that the tricks were pitiful, a waste of their money and an afternoon when they might have otherwise grilled hot-dogs with neighbors. But Momma found the circus perfectly marvelous: the musky smell of animals, the taste of Cracker Jack stuck to her back teeth, the oohs and ahs of children holding pinwheels that spun in the wind. And there was the woman wearing a gold sequined gown who presented each act with her arms raised to the sky.
    When the bear came on, or rather, when the sheet over its cage was pulled away, Momma said I began to kick wildly.
    “Our baby loves this bear,” she had told Dad.
    It was a young bear and meant to dance when given the command. Instead it stood on its hind legs and roared. When the sheet was dropped back over the cage, it continued to roar and I continued to kick.
    Dad wanted to leave right away to avoid traffic, but Momma insisted on staying after the performance to ask the name of the bear. Taking hold of Phil’s hand, she climbed onto the wooden platform, where the woman in gold knelt beside the bear’s cage, still covered in that white sheet, counting a stack of dollar bills.
    “Excuse me,” Momma said to her back. “Excuse me, please. Can you tell me the name of the bear?”
    The woman turned to Momma with eyes thickly lined in black, and in a Russian accent she said, “You mean this naughty little girl?”
    She banged on the bars with the palm of her hand, the cage rocking back and forth, and the bear sniffing the fabric into its nostrils. Phil pulled free of Momma’s hand, sprinting to Dad.
    “You want to know her name?” The woman drew the sheet to the side, her arm shining with sweat, and the bear tottered closer, shaking its head, reaching its paw, like a giant fuzzy slipper, through the bars. The woman did not speak the name, but sang it: “Ma-teelda!”
    They walked back through the parking lot of the hardware store—carpenters wheeling lumber in rattling metal carts and children with cotton candy stuck to their faces pulling against their parents’ hands—when Momma announced, “If our baby is a girl, her name will be Matilda.”
    Dad’s only response was to grumble about the line of cars all trying to exit at once. But Momma wouldn’t let him ruin her mood, saying, “Imagine just deciding one day that you’d like to buy a bear and travel from town to town, and you go and do it. And then you say, ‘I’d like to wear a sequined gown in a parking lot in the middle of the day,’ and you do that, too.”
    Momma had recounted this story so often. Sometimes details were left in or out, but there was always the gold sequined dress, and always the officers’ wives passing judgment from their higher seats.
    Back when she still picked me up after school, Momma had always been different from the others with her long orange hairand Indian-print skirts that went to her ankles. I remember, once, finding her with another mom as I worked my way to her through the crowded schoolyard.
    “It’s never done,” I heard her say. “Every day I spend hours cleaning, cooking, doing these things I hate, and it’s never ever done.”
    The other mom nodded, but also took a step backward as if to make clear they were not friends. “What if you relaxed in a bubble bath?” she suggested.
    By this time, I was near enough to reach Momma’s skirt, and as I scrunched the fabric in my fist, she pet the top of my head and pulled me close into her hip.
    “If I take a bubble bath, I’ll be even more behind!” she said. And laughing, she added, “What if I sink under the water to rinse my hair and just decide to stay there?”
    When the other woman’s child rushed to her arms, they left abruptly. Even though we were all headed in the same direction, she dragged her child up the hill so fast we couldn’t catch up.
    Momma had always been different from the others, and