Josephine was shoeless in the pasture before sunrise, the ground so cold she warmed her feet in the steam of cow manure, and when she met a man at market, eye-leveling tomatoes, she said, What lovely apples, and he married her, and she learned how to drive, practiced American sentences, birthed a daughter who covered her ears and hid from the thick-stew gurgle of old language, changed her name to an American flower, a delicate thing made to wilt on lapels and the lips of American men, lost her mother tongue, won a husband, an American who winked and laughed and learned the phrase for cabbage head, since he was cabbage head, he was cabbage head to Josephine and he made a badge of the phrase and he kept a lock of my little-girl hair, slipped me tens when my cousins got wadded-up ones, taught me to conceal the secret of favorites even though I’d done it for years, each year opening cards from Josephine, cards with fifties, cards with sprawling, varicose handwriting and unfurling cabbage-head leaves of money for me, for me, her American girl, heir to her middle name, her love of winter, her impulse to chase a shot with a long cool drink and laugh at men so proud to be American they never think twice about beauty, about bushels of gleaming fruit on the day you fall in love, or what it means to slip money to a girl who knows only the easy truth about old-country fields and will never speak any phrase but cabbage head because she is American like her mother and grandmother and grandfather, American enough to laugh when stupid men laugh and marry them, American enough to get rich from being born.