I sat with him for a few hours until he began to whimper, and I thought maybe he was hungry. I got his bottle from the fridge, turned the sink on warm, and held the bottle under the running water. I’d watched Mom test the bottle, watched her tip the bottle over and drip the formula onto her wrist. I tried it, but I didn’t know if it was the right temperature, didn’t know if it was too hot or not hot enough. With the bottle of formula, I went back to the room, set it on the nightstand, and while the formula cooled I made faces at Bedogi, made farting noises with my mouth. When I went to feed him, when he reached with his little mouth for the bottle’s rubber tip, somebody knocked on the back door.

The woman had her face pressed to the window, hands like a tunnel on each side of her eyes, and she saw me down the hallway, looking at her. She knocked again when I dipped back into Mom’s room, and kept knocking when I didn’t answer.

It was Marla. I dream of her at that door often, more so now that Mom is gone. Up to that point in time, I’d met her twice: once when I was in detention—or homework hall, whichever—and she came to ask me questions about home. The Native Studies teacher, a short skeejin guy who told funny stories about Gluskabe—“the man from nothing,” who had supposedly created us after many attempts—actually made her leave the school premises because my mother had no knowledge of the meeting. I met her the second time when she came to see Paige and the boy. She sat at our kitchen table while Paige was trying to think of a name for the child, and I asked Marla if she remembered me.

“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” she lied in a sweet light voice, and she shook my little hand. It was the right move, surely. That day, Mom decided not to like her. As Marla sat at our kitchen table writing down a lot of notes in cursive, Mom asked what she was writing, and Marla turned in the little seat under her legs and said, “The conditions here.”

I would never hear the end of that story. Mom brought it up for days. I didn’t blame her and I still don’t. I never saw a cleaner house than ours—Mom scrubbed everything spotless, and maybe used too much bleach when she was mad, as she had after Marla left that day. Mom had gotten on all fours and scrubbed the floor, saying every minute, “Did you see those legs? That winooch needs to look into her condition.”