Ma is in bed with a swollen face. Paps has told the boys that the dentist had punched her to loosen her teeth before he pulled them out. Afraid, the boys don’t go in her room for three days, but then become too curious not to. They enter the bedroom and touch her bruises.

Manny, Joel, and the narrator stand, the curtain wrapped around them, and wait for her to wake up. When she does, she calls them her “beautiful baby boys” (13). The words out of her swollen mouth make them turn away. The narrator puts his hand on the cold window glass and notes, “That’s how it sometimes was with Ma; I needed to press myself against something cold and hard, or I’d get dizzy” (13). Their mother is a whirlwind of emotions and moods, and her injury only adds to the confusion the boys feel about how to act around her.

Manny tells Ma it’s the narrator’s seventh birthday. She responds by saying that the narrator will leave her now that he has turned 7. Manny and Joel didn’t want to be around her after they turned 7—they wanted to fight and break everything—and she assumes the narrator will be the same.