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“Try some, try some, you will like it, you will see,” I begged like Sam in the book Green Eggs and Ham, but her silence always said, “You let me be.”

When she righted herself, Mama reminded me that headstands were good for her hormones, her aching back, her stressed shoulders, all her aches and stresses, really, the house, the garden, us kids. Paul was helping her, she said, but Pam was mostly taking care of baby Mariah, and the farm was too much work for her and Paul. She stopped her monologue to ask me to wash my bowl, and when I didn’t reply, she said we needed to work on “communication.”

“Maybe I’m having my time now,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m the parent here.”

As much as I wanted to say, No, she was not the parent, I knew there were laws of love, and the first is this: we owe our lives to our parents because they gave us life. Whenever I looked at the photo albums that documented our earlier years, I saw the mother she had been, standing next to me by the goat pen, wheeling me and Heidi in the wheelbarrow, and the pictures I loved best, of Mama and Papa taking turns pulling me across the black ice of the blueberry field in a little bushel basket. So I washed my bowl.

Mama was suffering the death of a child and the loss of her husband and marriage, but none of that made sense to the child I was then. She was simply no longer the mother I desperately needed.

“I’m having trouble coping,” she told Paul. “I’m just not sure I can hack it.”

Her eyes looked big and whirly a lot of the time, like they weren’t seeing what was in front of her, and a vein often pulsed visibly just under the skin of her forehead. There was a lack of focus to her movements, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. One time she walked out of the cabin and stood in the yard, wailing into the space of the clearing.

“Mama, what’s wrong?” I called out the door to her.

“I’m just getting my emotions out,” she said when she finally came in. She didn’t seem to think it was odd to scream like that. Sometimes we went down to visit Stan, who was camped in his silver camper behind the Nearings’ old house, the Gray House, everyone called it now, and he’d get Mama stoned. Mama and Stan had a good rapport, though she teased him that he was trying to get in her pants. “You’re so tightly wound,” he said, “a little toke will help you let go.” Getting high gave her the nervous giggles, and fat jokes would make her laugh until she cried. Stan had a party at the Gray House with regular brownies for the kids and hash brownies for the adults, but by the time we arrived, there were only adult brownies left. I ate a good number of those adult brownies, and Mama did, too, as we didn’t know there were supposed to be two kinds. I was wearing a baseball cap, and soon felt like pulling it low down over my head so the brim made a beak.

“I’m Donald Duck,” I repeated in a nasal voice, making use of the bits of pop culture gleaned from John. I ran in circles around Mama, hat over my eyes, flapping my elbows and waddling like I was too fat to walk. Mama laughed until her cheeks were wet with tears.

“Look at me, I’m Mama,” I said, turning my lips down to make a frown face as I walked around the addition in Mama’s boots. They were tall, up to the middle of my thighs, green rubber browned by dried dirt, with two small flaps through which dirty laces were tied in an old knot that never got untied.

“Me try,” Clara said.

“Ha,” I snorted. “You’re too little. The boots won’t fit on your short legs.”

“Whoaa,” I said, pretending to almost fall out the back door. It was warm out, but the cooler air of evening lay in wait.

“Me, me,” Clara said.

She’d been playing with my Sunshine Kids on the floor, which I didn’t care about because even though they were supposed to be natural dolls, we didn’t have things like the empty toilet paper rolls to make their furniture.

“No, you play with the dolls,” I said.

“Me wanna Mama,” Clara said, hugging onto my booted leg.

“Oh,