Two

Eight cars. God knows how many people per car. The number of aunties was endless, and every last Blackfeet woman of a certain age appeared to have crowded into Lena’s bungalow, clutching mugs of Lena’s ass-kicking coffee and awaiting the fry bread that Lola deduced would soon appear, given the scent and sizzle of melting lard wafting from the kitchen.

“Is this an intervention or a party?” she whispered to Jan. The women’s faces—eyebrows drawn together, arms folded across chests—indicated the former, but the room crackled with the anticipation that accompanied the latter. As was the case with most reservations, the tribe had its own contingent of well-meaning white outsiders trying to help with the alcoholism and addiction that accompanied the stratospheric unemployment in the remote stretches hard by the Canadian border. This time, however, the white person was the problem.

Turnabout was fair play, Lola supposed. She squared her shoulders and faced Alice Kicking Woman, the eldest among the elders in the room, and awaited the inevitable.

Alice sat flanked by Lena and Josephine, whose combined bulk nearly filled Lena’s loveseat. Between them Alice looked almost childlike, her head coming only to their shoulders, her feet dangling an inch above Lena’s spotless linoleum. Too late, Lola remembered her hiking boots. She bent to undo the laces and struggled out of them, adding them to the pile of knock-off Wellingtons by the front door.

“Look at you.” So Josephine had been picked to lead the charge.

A roomful of eyes lasered Lola, assessing a tall woman gone gaunt in her months of grief. Her chestnut hair, at best unruly, could have benefited from a brush or at least a ponytail. She was in her usual jeans and turtleneck, the casual wear customary throughout the region beyond the newly sophisticated cities of Denver and Salt Lake. The aunties wore an array of elastic-waist pants and soft, faded sweatshirts. But their clothing was clean and pressed, the faint scent of starch warring with the aroma of fry bread, while Lola’s jeans were on their fourth—fifth?—day, and she’d retrieved the turtleneck from the heap of laundry on the floor beside her too-empty bed. She ran her hands down her sleeves, trying too late to smooth wrinkles.

“What did you make Margaret for breakfast this morning?” Josephine again, more indictment than question.

“Um.” Why hadn’t she asked Margaret what she’d eaten? Then Lola could have truthfully answered fruit and cereal, same as every morning. But Josephine, the tribe’s treasurer, had the precision of a prosecutor, as any council member who’d tried to raid the tribal finances had found.

The women didn’t wait for Lola’s reply. “When did you leave the house?” That was Lena, mouth hard and tight as a marble.

“I can answer that.” Jan sounded entirely too chipper. “She rolled up to the paper just before ten. Work starts at nine.”

An unnecessary detail. They all knew good and well when the Express opened. Some mornings, Auntie Lena would be waiting at the newspaper’s door when Lola walked in, information in hand for an ad touting a reservation crafts fair or school event. She could have placed the ad online or by phone. But she liked the excuse for a trip to Magpie, whose meager shopping options were marginally better than those on the reservation.

“And counseling? Did that help?”

Lola didn’t respond. They all knew the answer. Because she hadn’t gone. At least, not after that first time, when the counselor suggested that her issues, rooted in a career that sent her careening from one tragedy to the next, had begun well before Charlie’s death.

Alice wriggled on the couch, freeing herself of Lena and Josephine, sliding forward until her feet touched the floor. She held out a hand. Josephine boosted her to her feet. Lola stepped back, feeling small even though she towered over Alice.

“How long he been gone?” Alice, as befitting custom, did not utter the name of the dead.

“Five months. A little more.” As if you didn’t know.

“It’s time. Past time.” She gave Lola a moment to ask, time for what?

Lola didn’t bother. Time to pull yourself together. Be a mother to Margaret. Time to do your damn job. She waited for the refrain.

But Alice changed things up. “Time to be yourself again. Your true self. Not … ” Her eyes raked Lola’s dishevelment.

Lola jammed her hands into her pockets. One of them had a hole. She poked two fingers into it and spread them, widening the opening, stitches giving way one by one with inaudible pops. She looked up. Caught Alice’s glance. She pulled out her hands and clasped them before her, a submissive posture harkening back to a Catholic elementary school, Alice scarier than any Mother Superior. Which was saying something.

“Your little girl, she sees you like this, thinks that’s the way to be. Weak.” Alice spat the word.

Wordless stirring among the women, who’d experienced a roster of misfortune that relegated Charlie’s death to mere routine. Josephine, fending off the occasional death threat from the relatives of corrupt tribal officials who’d ended up in prison as a result of her diligence. Her married granddaughter, Angela, always doing battle on behalf of her son, a two-spirit child whose feminine ways were not nearly so accepted in the white world as they were on the reservation. Lena, whose breast cancer had only recently been declared in remission. And Alice, of an age to have survived most of her immediate relatives, the older ones taken mostly by natural causes, but the younger ones heartbreakingly claimed by drugs and drink and by the fights and car crashes resulting from both. Lola was willing to bet half the women in the room had lost a partner. Alice had outlived three husbands, and, if the relentless reservation rumor mill was true, she was being courted by a possible fourth, a youngster of eighty to whom she now made oblique reference.

“And find yourself another man,” she said as Josephine and Lena eased her back down onto the couch. “Doesn’t have to be a husband,” she said from her throne. “Can just be for good times. Maybe another Indian man. More fun than those skinny whiteboys, break in half you get them in bed.”

“Oh, no,” Lola said into the chorus of appreciative chuckles. This, she hadn’t expected.

“Oh, yes.” Alice’s head bobbed, showing the razor line of part through hair mostly still black. “Quit holding on to something that’s gone.”

“How can you—?” Lola couldn’t continue. Useless to protest that she hadn’t wanted to marry anyone, that Charlie had only managed to change her mind after six years together and Margaret’s fifth birthday, that on her darkest nights she viewed his death as punishment for her prolonged aversion to matrimony.

Just as she was about to say something that would have required an apology, Jan stepped forward, an unlikely savior.

“All due respect.” Jan nodded to Alice, seeking permission to interrupt an elder with a whitegirl solution. “I agree with everything you say.” She continued to address Alice, avoiding Lola’s gaze. A moment later, Lola found out why.

Are you out of your mind?

Lola pressed her lips together as though the words had actually escaped. The women sardined on the loveseat and arrayed on folding chairs around the room straightened with interest.

Angela ducked into the kitchen and emerged with a tray of fry bread, her crew of helpers abandoning their posts at the stove and wedging themselves into the inadequate space in the living room. They’d missed too much of the show already. The women snatched at the tray, blowing on fingers scorched by the hot discs of bread, their eyes never leaving Jan as she outlined her plan.

“There’s a story assignment. It was my offer, originally. I mean, it was made to me by one of my old professors at the journalism school over in Missoula. He works at a magazine in Salt Lake now. He’s got a freelance budget like you wouldn’t believe. The story’s not heavy lifting, just a feature about adoption. He asked me if I could do it. And, believe me, I want to—”

Lola coughed. She knew Jan well enough to know whatever the size of the paycheck, Jan would no more relish a gooey feel-good story than she herself would. Yet that was exactly what Jan was proposing.

“Anyhow, I think it’s just the thing to get Lola here back on her feet. You know her. She’s only happy when she’s working. Except it seems she’s forgotten how to work.”

Jan paused, giving the disapproval in the room, which had softened with the emergence of the fry bread, time to reset, harder than before. The reservation’s unemployment rate was double the national average, and went higher still in winter when the tourists disappeared. A job, one that paid a living wage and offered benefits besides, was a rare and wonderful thing; to piss one away, as Lola appeared to be doing, was unforgivable. The women shoved the fry bread aside. Glared. A few shook their heads.

Even Jan appeared abashed. She collected herself and soldiered on. “This would get her out of town for a few days, in a new place where people don’t know her, won’t cut her a break the way we’ve all been doing. And it pays real money, too. Maybe she can make a donation to the tribe, a little payback for all the help that people here have given her. We’ll all have to take care of Margaret for a little longer, but I think it’s worth it. And Margaret won’t mind.”

Margaret loved her time with the aunties as least as much as they enjoyed caring for her. In their presence, she became sunny, helpful, polite. Or so Lola had been told. At home, Margaret was sullen, argumentative, newly reluctant to do formerly enjoyable chores such as brushing burrs from Bub’s fur or feeding and riding Spot, their Appaloosa, so long neglected since Charlie’s death that he’d gone half wild.

“You do it,” she’d snapped at her mother just a day earlier when Lola asked whether Spot had been fed. “You don’t do anything else around here.”

A roomful of eyes drilled into Lola, as though every woman there could read her thoughts, even though they didn’t need to. Margaret’s behavior at home was probably fodder for the warp-speed web of gossip that wrapped the reservation, just as Lola’s refusal to take Jan up on her offer would be.

Still—“You’re kicking me out?”

She rubbed her toe against the linoleum, noting too late that like her pocket, her right sock had a hole in it. No one had to tell her that if she refused the story, the babysitting would come to an end. Not to mention the steady delivery of casseroles—five months’ worth and counting—along with the groceries that mysteriously filled her refrigerator, and the kitchen and bathroom that gleamed with cleanings far more effective than her own.

But to leave Margaret! She’d barely survived losing Charlie. In Salt Lake, at least the way Jan had outlined things, she’d be alone, truly alone. Except for her trip to an Arizona prison to confront the man who’d aided the attack that killed her husband, she hadn’t left Magpie, let alone Montana, since his death.

“Jan, I appreciate it, I do. But you must need the money.”

No shit, Jan’s face said. But what she said aloud was “Margaret needs you more.” And, echoing Alice, “The real you, not this mess you’ve become.” Never one to mince words, Jan.

Josephine took over. “If you don’t want to do this—”

Lola turned to her in relief. Under no circumstances did she want to do this.

“—then maybe Margaret comes and lives with one of us for a while. Maybe with someone who has kids. A family.”

I’m her family! Had she screamed the words? Lola thought she had. But the women sat silent and impassive, judgment rendered. She looked to the door, the windows, any means of escape, and took the only acceptable route.

“Just give me a minute. Please. I need to use the bathroom.”

The air behind her went slack. The hum of conversation filled the room, the main business dispensed with, gossip commencing.

No window in the bathroom. What had she been thinking, anyway? Crawl through a window, run across a prairie in full view of everyone in the house, drive away—where? The only true escape, the one she’d already considered. Lola pressed her head against the medicine cabinet’s cool mirrored surface and considered breaking it. A single razoring shard, sliced across her wrists, would do the trick. Was there enough time? She imagined the aunties bursting through the door, finding her on the floor, her blood soaking Lena’s fluffy lime-green rug. They’d save her, through sheer force of will if nothing else, and make her pay for the rug besides.

But Jan’s plan was impossible. For one thing, she was down to the last pain pill that helped her sleep. Maybe she’d find a way to pull through without the pills at home, but in a strange city, away from her child? She was going to have to go back out there and tell everyone no, make them believe that despite all the other times, this time she’d really get it together. Which probably wouldn’t work.

Acknowledging as much, Lola lingered a moment more, opening the medicine cabinet and scanning its contents, that old reporter’s habit. A toothbrush, toothpaste, floss. Lena’s strong white teeth, never subjected to the sugary treats that saw so many rez kids sporting mouths full of metal, were her pride. Jergens face cream. Q-tips. An arthritis rub. And, in one corner, a cluster of pill bottles. Lola’s eyes narrowed.

She reached for them so quickly that a couple fell to the floor, fortunately landing on the sound-swallowing rug. Tamoxifen for the cancer itself. Zofran to fight the nausea of chemo. Ambien, the sleep medication that had already proven supremely unhelpful. And yes, finally, a two-year-old prescription, but still—Oxycontin, six tablets left. Lola shook them into her hand and tucked the bottle back behind the others. One a week. She’d been taking her pills two, maybe three times a week, but she could cut back. Make these last long enough to get her through this fresh hell. She emerged from the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully to arrange her face in the memory of a smile as she assembled the lie.

“Look. This is a lot to think about. It’s a really good idea”—she tried not to choke on the words—“but I need a day or two to adjust to it.” By which she meant, time to come up with an acceptable way to tell them there was no way she’d submit to such bullshit.

Jan looked at Alice. She nodded.

“All right,” said Jan. Again, she glanced at Alice. “Two days?”

Alice’s lips thinned. “One. What time is it?”

Around the room, women fumbled in pockets and purses for their phones. “About eleven.”

“This time tomorrow—real time, not Indian time—you let her know.” Alice pursed her lips, pointing them at Jan.

Not Indian time. They weren’t screwing around.

A low whisper, barely a sigh, at Lola’s ear. She whirled. Nothing. No one. But she’d heard it, a single word:

Good.