“He is good. Recently he’s been not good.”

He was good at one time, but Mom was right: Frick had gotten meaner ever since he stopped being a part-time medicine man and started drinking full-time.

Grammy coughed. “You’re going to have to tell him,” she said. “When he comes back, you say it. You can’t have children. And then you go from there.”

Children?

“Miracles can happen,” Mom said. “But I don’t want to risk what happened before.”

“Doos,” Grammy said. “You can’t have children. Face it. You tell him that, and that’s the end of the discussion.”

“He’ll leave,” Mom said. “He will.”

“Are you forgetting you have a son?” Grammy said. “And a daughter?”

“A daughter,” Mom said. “I almost forgot.”

“She’s still grieving,” Grammy said. “And she’s her own person. A grown woman. She can go and do as she pleases.”

Mom said nothing to that first part. “She is a grown woman,” Mom said. “Frick wants us to have our own.”

“Michigun,” Grammy said. “He wants a dark baby all for himself. That’s what those western Natives always want—dark babies. Pass me that ashtray.”

Mom didn’t say anything.

“Go ahead,” Grammy said. “Don’t believe me.”

A chair squeaked against the floor.

“I told you what I can,” Grammy said. “You have to figure the rest out.”

“You’re not staying?” Mom said.

“I have to go to church,” Grammy said. The back door opened. “Doosis,” Grammy said. “Something smells funny in here.”

“It’s probably that garbage,” Mom said.

“No, no,” Grammy said. “It smells fishy.”

“I don’t smell anything like that,” Mom said.

I took a whiff in my room, and I agreed—I didn’t smell anything.

“I don’t know, then,” Grammy said, and as she left she repeated to Mom that she should tell Frick, and when Mom thought she was all alone she said it again: “I don’t want to risk it.”

Risk what? Children? Is that why Frick didn’t seem to like me, because I wasn’t his?

I got out of bed. From the hallway I watched Mom at the kitchen table sipping coffee. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out to the kitchen, all that remained at the table was the rest of the coffee and a freshly snubbed-out cigarette that glowed red in the ashtray.

I knocked on her bedroom door.

“I’m sick,” Mom said. “Go watch TV.”

I turned the TV on, but didn’t watch it. I picked up the phone and dialed Dad’s number.

It rang once and only once and he answered right away, eager to talk to me like always with his “Hey, buddy!” and I didn’t even let him say his “How’s my buddy today?” before I asked him why Mom didn’t want to risk having another baby, why Grammy said Mom couldn’t.

“What?” he said.

“Why can’t she?” I said.

“Put your mother on the phone,” Dad said.

I looked up the hallway to Mom’s room, and her door opened.

“Who are you talking to?” Mom said.