I liked watching you cook and eating with you. In the heat of the kitchen, tendrils of black hair curled off your face. You seemed certain when you were making a meal for me, no matter how simple—and the meals were always simple: open-faced cream cheese sandwiches softened under the broiler, long strips of hamburger fried in a pan and served with mint and yogurt, rice tossed with chickpeas.

When we weren’t tossing out snotty tissues and cigarette ash or making a meal or a snack or afternoon tea, we watched the ten-inch black-and-white TV in the basement, where the reception was terrible. We never left the house. No preschool, no walks, no trips to the grocery store. If I wanted to pretend I was playing outside, I’d skip around the coffee table in the living room, humming that jump-rope song: “My mama and your mama were out hanging clothes/My mama punched your mama …” Except I thought it was “hugging clothes” and “jumped your mama,” and there was no one to correct me.

The living room had a bay window filled with plants, a little jungle. There were ferns and creeping things with heart-shaped leaves, a ficus pruned like a huge green lollipop, orchids with petals like candy hearts, velvet-leafed African violets, a shock of gangly mint. The plants were in fake terra-cotta pots that were cracked on the sides and crammed close together, some of them half stacked on each other. Renegade clovers grew along the edges of the pots. W’s marmalade cat, Poppy, slept in the one narrow space left on the floor.

You fought with W about the blue damask drapes that hung ceiling to floor. You wanted them closed. She wanted them open. She left for the hospital intensive-care unit before we woke up, and when we went upstairs for breakfast, we would find the curtains open. You made me sit at the kitchen table, out of sight, while you swiftly drew the drapes closed and flicked on the lamps. The yellow light turned the carpet greenish.

In the afternoon, I would sit in the swivel chair closest to the front door, waiting for W to arrive in her white cardigan and slacks and white leather shoes with piping around the edges. She would clink the metal mail slot cover on the front door, and I’d run over to see her face through the slot. I’d run back to the chair before you could drag me from the door. W would tramp inside, stomp the snow off her boots and tug them off, lay her cardigan in my lap, walk straight to the window, and tug the pulley.

W told me to turn the lamps off while she bent down and caressed the leaves of her plants as though they were kitten ears. “Look,” she said. “They’re reaching for the sunlight your mother deprived them of.”