It seems to me that my family packed up and left on the very same day that Billie’s mother came to the house, avoided everyone’s eyes, and made her sour announcement.
“The welfare knows you’re here,” she said to no one in particular, but somehow indicating us. The words themselves made no sense to me, but I somehow understood that we were being told to leave. Certainly her words were strong enough to make my mother fly out the door.
She took her rage out on a field of weeds near the house, flinging any belongings that wouldn’t fit in the car—photos, papers, her yellow-stained wedding dress—and leaving them heaped up in angry piles between milkweed and goldenrod. I didn’t understand until much later about my mother’s factory income counting against Billie and her kids, about the tribal council’s righteous discomfort with the stream of white faces running through their land, how my baby sister’s father was hardly ever around, or how his few comings and goings included a certain redhead who drove my mother crazy.
In the same way it seemed that mere hours elapsed between the old woman’s announcement and our leaving, it also seemed suddenly clear that she had never liked my mother. I decided that the unsmiling face was worse than a gagohsa, and helped load up the Buick. We packed the car with whatever boxes and bags would fit, and my mother stopped at Bell’s Market to buy food for the motel room that would house us for the days and nights to come. Bread and cheese.
I squished a slice of bread between my fingers, kneaded it into a pasty ball, and shoved it whole into my mouth.