Each morning she gave me a bit of coffee mixed with whole milk. It was all with the idea that she would start the powerful engine of the mind early. Each breakfast was followed by her special blend of math tutoring and recitation practice, wherein I would recite a poem after each time I had properly summed a fraction. And then our lunch, where she would drink a chilled glass of sugar water and I would lay down with my belly against hers and latch easily to her breast. Even in those early days I could feel the groove of flesh growing in a place under her shoulder, the lip hooking over my chest and arms, binding me and holding me close.

One afternoon, she talks while I’m feeding of how I ought to find a bride, a woman who can care for me the way she does. I laugh a little, milk spittling around my mouth, but she doesn’t laugh. She says: there will be a time when we cannot enjoy these long afternoons, and you will be in the world alone, and my heart breaks to consider you out there, wandering, lost.

I can feel her body shudder around me. The milk in my mouth takes on the salty flavor of tears she’s absorbed. It strikes me how weak she feels, how little she’s carried me in recent days. It’s important to me, she says, that we find you a mate.

And so we audition prospective girlfriends. I retain a service and the girls make appointments. They arrive one at a time to my mother’s home and sit on her couch. They are too fat or too thin, too pretty or too ugly. One is focused on the pathetic trajectory of her career, while another sounds bovine in her interest in raising a family and moving to the country. One girl plays idiotically with her hands in her lap while claiming her girlfriends convinced her to schedule a meeting with us. She is pretty and I like her fear.

My mother sits beside me in her high-back chair. She had been taking notes in a composition book but while this last one speaks, she closes the cover and turns slightly, facing the wall. I tell the girl on the couch that she should leave and tell the girls in the hallway to clear out as well. The girl goes without another word, watching my mother all the while. I wonder what she’s looking for: a second opinion, perhaps. She doesn’t find it.