“Look at you. You’re so thin,” Ann said. “Check this out.” She pulled up her shirt and grabbed a handful of flesh from her stomach. “It’s so gross. Like raw chicken.”

Noah was amazing and precious. Poppy loved the way he smelled, loved to clip his fingernails while he was sleeping, loved the way he sucked his bottom lip. She played peekaboo and blew into his stomach so he’d laugh. He was so soft and juicy and sweet. But he was also difficult in the way that babies are difficult. She understood why sleep deprivation was used as a method of torture on prisoners, and during long crying jags from teething or gas she felt sudden sympathy for mothers who shook their babies. She begged Noah to stop crying. “Please,” she’d say. “I’ll do anything. Just give me peace and quiet for five minutes.”

Even though it was hard, Ann was a good mother, shouldering the burden of love and worry for this tiny living thing she’d brought into the world while still somehow managing to take classes at the college in the fall. Poppy had vowed she’d never have a child of her own, partly because having a kid meant having a family, and her once-close family had changed from the stress. She couldn’t wait to move out.

But when she did, she thought of Noah all the time, and ached to be with him, remembering how his sweet face lit up whenever he saw her. Most weekends through college, she took the Badger Bus home from UW–Madison. One fall day she’d arrived home and found Noah banging his hands on the tray of his high chair when she walked into the kitchen, baby food all over his face. “Pay-ay.”

“He knows your name,” her dad said, his big hand resting gently on Noah’s soft curls. Most people seemed older when they became grandparents, like her mom. She’d doted after Noah, talking in baby talk, knitting pumpkin hats for him and showing baby photos to all of her friends. Her dad, on the other hand, seemed younger now, as though he fed off all Noah’s endless baby energy. “Hey, sport, who am I?” He pointed at himself. Noah said, “Dooo.” Her dad beamed. “I’m not ready for ‘Grandpa,’” he said. “I want him to call me ‘Dude.’”

One weekend when Poppy watched Noah, she gave him a bath and trimmed his hair with her mom’s sewing scissors. Ann came home, took one look at him, and broke down in tears. “That was his first haircut! How could you do that? I wanted to save his first lock.”

Poppy didn’t know Ann had a soft, sentimental side. The baby had changed her. “That’s so, like, Victorian. You really care about stuff like that?”

“Of course!” Ann reached into the bathroom garbage looking for hair. It was easy to set Ann off.