Forty-eight

Jan reverted to form once it had been established that Lola would live. There’d been too many months of too many broken promises, so Lola was going to have to prove herself again—and again, and again—before Jan found her way back to trust. Fair enough.

No fun, though. And especially no fun on the trip back to Montana. Jan had driven Lola’s truck to Salt Lake, a trip that, as she reminded Lola at least every twenty minutes, had only taken a little over eight hours. But on the return journey, every bathroom break—and given their mutual coffee consumption, there were many—required a complicated descent from the truck, and then the hop on crutches across the parking lot along with a fair amount of cursing from both parties.

For the first couple hundred miles, those untoward phrases were the only words exchanged. Jan might have lost her trust in Lola, but Lola’s shoulder ached beneath the weight of a chip of its own. After all, if Jan hadn’t badgered her into taking the assignment from Families of Faith, her knee would still be intact. For starters. The silence lasted into Idaho, where the mountains, as though abashed by the grandeur to the south, lowered themselves into decorous foothills. At their base, the land flattened out into fields, now brown, that in summer would be green with acres of potatoes and legumes that bore testament to big agriculture.

Lola ground her teeth in boredom. She tried to sleep but the urgent distress in her knee forbade it.

“Are you sure?” the doctor had asked when she’d refused painkillers upon being discharged.

“Positive.”

Skepticism and understanding alternated across his face. “You’ll have a rough go of it.”

“Really?”

He’d fumbled for words of reassurance before he caught her sarcasm. Lola was nobody’s favorite patient. The hospital couldn’t discharge her fast enough. The tall nurse stopped Jan as she pushed Lola’s wheelchair toward the waiting pickup. He handed Lola a squeeze ball.

“We usually give these to people with arm injuries to build their strength back up.”

“And yet.” Lola pointed to her knee.

His voice sharpened. “Just trying to help. I thought it might take your mind off the pain.”

As Lola hoisted herself out of the chair, she could have sworn she heard him mutter, “Or you could stuff it up your ass.”

As the miles passed, Lola squeezed and squeezed, longing for a distraction from both the pain and the endless brown fields. At this rate, she thought, she’d have muscles like Popeye by the time they got to Magpie.

Jan cleared her throat. “I guess we should talk.”

Only Lola knew, and knew because she herself wasn’t the talk-it-through type, what those words cost Jan. She stopped squeezing and tried to assume an attentive yet dignified position, difficult when one’s lap was a mess of candy wrappers and bags of the junk food she’d insisted upon buying the last time they’d stopped for gas.

“I probably shouldn’t have gotten so mad at that text you sent. But I thought you were bailing on us. Again.”

Lola’s earlier silence had aimed to punish. Now, she offered an explanation.

“Bail? I didn’t freaking bail. It was you. All of you. You kicked me out. Banished me! I could barely keep it together at home and you made me leave.”

“Oh, please.” Jan looked remarkably unconcerned at the accusation. She wasn’t even chewing her braid. She did, in fact, reach for the open bag of Cheetos in Lola’s lap and help herself to a handful.

“Mmm. Love these things. Especially the way they turn your fingers orange.” She licked them. “Just like old times, huh? The two of us heading off to a story, eating crap.”

Old times. Lola barely remembered them. The last time they’d chased a story together, Charlie had been alive. He’d hated her penchant for road food. She remembered the way she’d slide her orange-stained fingers into her pockets as she sauntered into the house after one of those trips, how she’d hurry into the bathroom to wash away the evidence. But he’d always find out. An errant wrapper on the floor of the truck, the smudge of orange on the gearshift. Lola’s face felt funny. She realized she was smiling. Her chest hurt, as it did whenever she thought of Charlie. But a new emotion had crept in, soft and fond.

She puzzled over it. Was this how things were going to go? Would warmth ever replace the pain? Did she want it to?

She mused so long and hard that she forgot about her tirade until Jan spoke again. If she’d thought Jan’s lighthearted Cheetos remark meant she was going to get off easy, she’d been mistaken.

“We banished you? That’s a good one. You banished yourself. You crawled down into some deep, stinking sewer of grief and pulled the manhole cover over you. Kept all of us out. Even though we were hurting, too. The whole rez. Do you know what it meant to them, Charlie being the first Indian sheriff in a white county? All the aunties who helped raise him up. Even me. Don’t forget, I knew him way before you did. He always dealt with me straight, never tried to bullshit me the way a lot of sources did. And Margaret! You left that child without a father or a mother, either. By the time you went off to Utah, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what the reason was. Your being gone was no different than your being around.”

“I didn’t go off to Utah. I was sent,” Lola sulked.

“Because we knew it would get you off your ass. And?”

“And what?”

“Admit we were right.”

Lola grabbed a handful of Cheetos and stuffed them in her mouth. “Can’t,” she mumbled around them. “Mouth full.”

“Say it,” Jan insisted.

“Mmph, mmmph.”

“Good enough,” Jan said.

And each turned her head away from the other to hide their respective smiles.

It was late afternoon when they crossed the Montana line, dusk when they left the interstate, and full dark by the time they got to Magpie. The sign in Nell’s Cafe had long been turned to Closed. A clerk stood lonely in the interior glow of the convenience store.

Past the harsh glare of streetlights, the waxing moon took over, silvering the snowy ridgelines, casting the coulees in deep shadow. Lola looked west, toward the black wall of the Front. Her breath caught. She cracked her window. Caught the scent of sage.

The truck rounded a curve and approached the turnoff to the ranch. Lola forgot she was angry. Her heart did a marimba solo in her chest. Margaret.

Jan slowed not a bit.

“What the—?”

“She’s at Lena’s.”

After that, it was back to the sullen silence. But lighter, somehow. A smile kept forcing its way to Lola’s lips as the moonlight highlighted the MacPhersons’ herd of registered Angus, the horses that the Eckmans couldn’t bear to sell even though there were far too many for the occasional ranch chore that still relied on them. She wished they’d stopped at the house to pick up Bub.

The reservation town was, if possible, more moribund than Magpie. The school, the site of so many community events, seemingly something every night, stood black. Jan turned into the parking lot and pulled around to the front rather than continuing on to the large lot behind it that everybody used. “Margaret forgot her bookbag,” she said by way of explanation. “Her teacher said she’d leave it outside the front door.”

Lola slumped. Was she never going to get to see her daughter?

Jan stopped the truck. “Crap,” she said. She pulled out her phone. “I just got a text from Jorkki. Probably some story he wants me to chase tomorrow. I have to deal with this. You get it. It’ll be good practice for you, getting out of the truck by yourself.”

Like hell, Lola thought.

Margaret’s purple book bag leaned against the brick wall, maybe a dozen feet away. It might as well have been a mile. Lola opened the door, stuck the crutches out, and leaned them against the side of the truck. Then she turned her back to the door and slowly lowered one foot to the snow-sheeted pavement and grabbed the crutches, positioning them under arms already rubbed raw, berating herself for ignoring Charlie’s occasional advice to add upper-body strength training to her running regimen. Her arms quivered. The knee upped the pain ante.

“Ow-ow,” swing. “Ow-ow,” hop.

She advanced upon the bookbag.

Swing. Hop. Almost there.

A final swing. She transferred a crutch to her other hand and held tight to both as she leaned down to grab the bag.

The door swung open. Light flooded the sidewalk. A small girl and a small dog shot from the crowd within and knocked Lola Wicks right on her ass.

The aunties installed Lola at a long table, slapping down a stack of fry bread before her, along with a bowl filled to the brim with bison stew.

Alice Kicking Woman sat on one side, Margaret on the other, as close as she could be without crawling into her mother’s lap, emitting peals of laughter every time she rubbed her mother’s shorn head. Under the table, Bub lay across Lola’s good foot, raising his head occasionally to catch a bit of bison slipped to him by Margaret. Lola leaned over to bury her nose in her daughter’s hair, a habit since Margaret’s infancy.

“Mom. Stop smelling me. People will see.” A complaint since Margaret had learned to talk, one lacking just enough outrage to undercut its veracity.

“No one’s paying attention.” Lola pointed out the obvious. The school cafeteria was packed, most of the tables filled, with a line still snaking before the steam trays. The trays held the usual suspects at any reservation feast—the stew, fry bread, and macaroni and cheese, alongside stacks of bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, and cups of sweet sodas and instant lemonade. Most of the people still in line were young, the elders having been served first as per protocol.

“You didn’t really think the aunties would pass up the chance for a celebration, did you?” Jan sat across the table. She snagged a piece of fry bread from Lola’s stack. Powdered sugar whitened her lips.

“I don’t deserve it.” Lola spoke low, beneath the room’s hubbub. But Alice overheard.

“You went away broken. You came home healed.”

“Healing.” A small correction, one that did not risk an insult to an elder.

Alice nodded understanding. “That’s enough.”

Enough for a celebration, especially given the reservation’s penchant to mark the smallest occasion with a full-on feed. But there was more to it than that. Waging a lopsided battle against unemployment and poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, an underfunded Indian Health Service and a housing shortage that verged on criminal, the reservation took pride in marking every victory, no matter how small.

A soldier returned alive from Afghanistan or Iraq. A successful completion of rehab. Graduation—every last one, from elementary school on up through the big door prizes of law school, medical school, or a PhD. Lola had heard more times than she could count about the daylong hurrah that accompanied Charlie’s election as sheriff.

“Wonder what he would think of this?” The words escaped unbidden. No need to specify whom.

Margaret took her hand. “I wish he were here.”

Me, too, Lola would have said, but for the tears clogging her throat.

Alice’s sharp elbow punctured her self-pity. “He’d be glad to see you with family.”

Family.

Lola looked around the room, at the aunties and elders who’d insisted—rightly—that only the act of leaving would underscore the value of what she had at home. At Jan, more like a sister than a friend. Even Jorkki, a few seats away, his wispy hair shining white among all the dark heads surrounding him, had looked after her in his fashion, assigning her one impossible-to-screw-up feature after another while he delayed his retirement and labored overtime to put out the paper and cover the stories she’d normally have written.

As an only child whose parents were long dead, Lola had limited her concept of family to Charlie and Margaret. Now she realized the short-sightedness of that view. Family meant the people who surrounded you, who put up with your bullshit—up to a point—and called you on it when you crossed the line. It meant blood relations when they fit the bill, and others when the shared DNA let you down.

She thought of Trang and Mai, determined to find one another after so many years apart. Because they were family. Of Tynslee and Kwesi and Trang and Malachi, forming their own little band against the strictures they faced. Of Malachi and Munro, who despite her instinctive dislike of him had unhesitatingly stepped up in support of his son. Of Bryce and Galon, their secret bond of longer duration than most of the church-approved marriages that were held up as the only true way. Of poor Sariah, who loved her family so much that she was willing to defy convention on their behalf.

And Melena, the dark side of family, willing to do battle for an image even if it meant destroying those she loved. For far too long, Lola herself had wallowed in a different sort of darkness—not one that lashed out in violence but withdrew into grief, obstinately pulling away from the strong arms surrounding her.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry about what?”

A familiar voice. But in an impossible place. “Munro?”

She turned, only to be confronted with the retreating back of a lanky figure, hair flying as he hurried away. It had to be a mistake.

It wasn’t. He rounded the table and wedged himself in beside Jan.

“What the hell—I mean, what brings you here?” Lola hadn’t expected a test of her newfound humility quite this soon.

He shoveled up some bison stew and closed his eyes in appreciation. “God, that beats those airline peanuts,” he said. “I almost wished I’d driven. What with the time I had to wait in the security line in Salt Lake, and then getting the rental car in Great Falls and driving up here, it took just about as long.”

“You did the right thing,” Jan assured him. “Believe me, the drive’s no fun. Although in my case, it might have had something to do with the company.”

“Why are you here?” Lola had made her single stab at good manners. If people wanted her healed, they’d have to deal with the old Lola.

“Had some time on my hands. I quit the magazine.”

“Wow.” So Munro had a backbone after all. Which deserved her grudging “Congratulations.”

“And … ”

Lola got a bad feeling. “And what?”

Munro and Jan shared a conspiratorial smile. Jan spoke first. “You know how Jorkki’s retiring?”

“And how I’m out of work?” Munro added.

Lola’s fry bread fell into her stew. “No. Oh, no. No, no, no.”

“Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s not a done deal. I’m just here for an interview. By the way, Anne Peterson says thanks. She’s really going to town on the story. Nice of you to hand over your notes. I didn’t figure you for the type.” That gunslinger’s grin.

Alice’s elbow again, so sharp that Lola jumped. Which had the unwelcome effect of getting Munro’s and Jan’s attention just as Lena said, not bothering to keep her voice down at all, “He looks good. You don’t snap him up, maybe I will.”

“She can’t,” Jan said. “He’ll be her boss. Forbidden fruit. He’s all yours.”

Forbidden fruit. Something twanged within Lola. A feeling too long forgotten and now rushing back with far too much intensity She started to cross her legs. Her knee asserted itself. She made a stab at dignity.

“I’m not snapping up anything except some dessert. Come on, Margaret. I think I saw Lena’s chocolate cake.”

She crutched away, Margaret trailing reluctantly, twisting to study the stranger in their midst. Lola directed her attention to the cake. “That piece. And that one. Can you take them back to the table, please? I’m going to get some air.”

She slipped through a side door, trading the overheated gym and its good-humored racket for the crystalline silence of a Rocky Mountain night. The moon wobbled atop the Front, a pale balloon about to break free and soar up and up, seeking a place among the great glittering panoply of stars.

Yellow light, man-made and pedestrian, splashed across her.

“Thought I’d find you here.” The door closed behind Munro.

He stood beside her, so close she could feel the warmth of his body, the cumulus cloud of his breath mingling with her own. The masculine scent of Scotch and cigarettes. That damnable thrum within.

He lifted his chin toward the Front. “Do you ever get used to it?”

She shook her head. “Never.”

Just like I’ll never get used to Charlie being gone. A vow, a promise, a solemn pact …

Oh, cut the crap, Lola. You’re already forgetting me. Not forgetting, but looking ahead. As you should. You’re back on your feet. You’ll be fine. I don’t know about him, though. Poor guy.

A final time, she whirled. A final time, nothing.

Nothing but the soft, absolving laughter of Charlie’s goodbye.

the end