The narrative flashes back to 1979. Rosalie wakes in the basement of her foster home after dreaming about her mother. In the dream, her mother tended a fire with a deer antler while a gutted buck drained behind her. Shirley, Rosalie’s stepmother, rifled through her things again—her books are scattered, and her jean pockets turned out. Her diploma is torn. As revenge, Rosalie cuts a small hole in one of Shirley’s sweaters before going down to the river to pray.

She gives an offering of cigarette tobacco to the river, which she thinks of as her connection to her home up north. Then she heads to a grocery store to look for a job; since she graduated, she’ll be put in a group home on her 18th birthday if she doesn’t have a job or a place of her own. She is surprised to see her friend Gaby Makespeace, a Dakhóta girl who befriended her at school before dropping out in her junior year to have a baby. Gaby is with her toddler son, Mathó, and looks dazzling in her dancer dress for powwow.

When Rosalie gets to the register with the loaf of bread she’s supposed to buy, she discovers that Shirley took her money.