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– Maggie searched her daughter’s face to see what the smart girl knew – “… away – away from here – she never called or nothing. Just left, mad at us and crazy at the world. When she came back, she wasn’t the same anymore.”
    Noticing the worry on her daughter’s face, she said, “She loves you just as much, Birdie, she’s just lost the piece of her that knows how to show it.”
    Showing it is precisely the thing that Bernice struggles with as she remembers that moment. Inside her, she swells with memories and prickles with bodily reminders of her life. Before. Here. Her body and her emotions are inseparable now, her Sealy mattress a vessel within which one thing becomes indiscernible from another. Lying there, filled with a mix of emotions and feelings: hurt, pain, longing, love and remorse – Bernice’s body reveals none of this in its calm. To Freda and Lola, whom she can feel the worry on like a hangover, she is failing, but she knows better. This is a gathering.
    Her strength is surely being tested, she thinks. Her ache for home, home being something she does not yet understand, and a place she has never been, brushes over her like a skirt hem on the floor. If the women could see her insides, she imagines they would see a churning, a quickening, a real live storm inside of her. Whatever was happening, her pulse remains the same while her skin feels lit from within.
    The feeling is a little bit like that moment before fainting, if she remembers correctly. She is a bit of an expert and remembers it felt like taking off and then putting on your skin again. She tries to think of herself as a moose stew. She will know when she is done. Her mom made the best moose stew; maybe it was because the meat was always fresh, maybe it was because her bannock was served with it, but that stew was like a tonic that could cure most things. Maybe, she thinks, moose is home.
    The last time she had fresh moose was in the fall, before she moved into the city to go to school. She would have beentwelve or thirteen. Her mom, of course, made it. Tiny and weary, her mom was unusually heavy on her feet as she got up and walked to the tall pine cupboard that she had recently painted and put in the kitchen. Her short brown arm barely touched the rear of the cupboard and she almost disappeared as she reached for something in the back. Bernice saw her eyes flutter as she grasped what she was looking for and tipped it with her fingers in to get it. She pulled out a brown box, which rattled with change. Her mom seemed to have trouble holding her balance, and she veered a bit towards the stairs trying to make it back to her chair at the table.
    Her mom had fished out a five-dollar bill. “Can you go and get me some salt from the HiLo? It’s still early and we’re gonna need some tonight.”
    “Salt tonight? We still have lots.” She had lifted the shaker, shaped like a fat dancing white woman. It felt heavy.
    “Ayuh, we’ll need more, I’m gonna dry some meat and make some stew tonight.”
    “Tonight?” She was trying to get her mom to talk because she didn’t want to go outside in the dark and in the windy cold.
    “Don’t stall, put your clothes on. The sooner you get out there the sooner you will get home.”
    Bernice had trudged to the front door and put on her jacket.
    “Not that one, the parka, and you’d better put your snow pants on, too.”
    “I’ll look stupid, I hate those pants, Mom, they’re too small and they make me look …” – she searched for a word – “… like a bimbo.”
    Bimbo the Birthday Clown was on every Saturday at 6:30in the morning during the
Uncle Bobby
show. He was the worst part of the Professor Kitzel, Max the Mouse and Spider-Man marathon that she, Freda and whichever cousins were over used to watch together.
    “Don’t use that word in this house,” her mother spat venomously at her. “Don’t you ever use that word.”
    Though tiny, she solidly planted herself in front of