My mother was a weighty woman, basting the bathtub in her folds, singing in German like a tropical bird never once washing the tub ring, that dirty halo, that perfectly gray ring, except where she had rubbed part of it away with her toes near the spiket. She said when shed lived in Switzerland, Grandad made their family live on a ranch and he would transplant these strange fake hearts into the bodies of calves. My mother would write down the data and my Grandfather would take them into a room and cut their ribs back for them. “You see, cows have a lot more ribs” she said. You know, remember the fourth of July? The red ribs dripped from our hands. Children left their finger prints all over their mother’s dresses and the mothers cleaned their children’s mouths with saliva. The point was to see how long those baby calves could live with their false hearts. My mother was in fact so large; she’d have to have me help her out of the bathtub, worn wrinkled in water as an old Italian purse. “You know I love you the most. You’re my favorite child, you’re the special one because you’re the only one who really understands me” she’d say as I pulled the mountain of her weight from her halo. Her eyes were grayer than usual, tubrings trying to purge their pupils. “I love you the most” reaches me in waves of vodka stenched slurring. Later I would try to locate my heart by feeling between, a rib and another rib.