FIFTEEN

No matter how early she got up, Lola thought as she registered voices in the kitchen, someone in this household was always ahead of her.

Naomi stood at the stove, flipping pancakes with the insouciance of an orchestra conductor. Thomas perched on a stool, his long legs in faded denim wound around its metal ones. The face he turned to Lola was all haggard lines and under-eye circles so dark it looked as though someone had punched him. His wan “Morning” ended in a choking cough. A yellow legal pad sat at his elbow. Some sort of list ran halfway down the page. He turned it over when he saw Lola looking.

She shrugged her way past him, pretending she hadn’t been caught, and poured coffee into the largest mug she could find. “I knew I heard a car.” Her eyes wandered to the pad again, its blank cardboard backing a mockery. “What time did you get in?”

“Late,” he said. “Or early, depending on how you look at it. I was … out with friends.”

“You must have gotten the car fixed,” Lola said. “It’s a lot quieter. No backfires. And I could have sworn I heard that car twice. Were you coming and going in the middle of the night? You and your friends must have had quite a time.”

Naomi shushed her with a hiss. She reached for the radio that sat on the counter and turned it up louder. It spat a stream of agitated Diné, high and low tones punctuated by glottal stops. A pancake bubbled and turned brown around the edges, then black, as Naomi stared at the radio. An occasional English phrase leaked through. Conrad Coal. FBI. Thomas put down his coffee. The Navajo Times lay open before him. A photo spread showed the truck’s charred metal skeleton and grim-faced headshots of faces both white—Conrad Coal executives—and Indian. Lola recognized the elder’s portrait, bordered in black, among them, and surmised that the second black-bordered photo was that of the truck driver.

Smoke rose from the skillet. Naomi slid the spatula beneath the charred round and sent it soaring into the sink. Country music replaced the newscast, a guy trying to figure out whether he preferred his girl to his truck, the homespun sentimentality jarring in contrast to the lurid photographs in the newspaper.

Naomi dripped another circle of batter on the skillet. “There’s going to be a meeting,” she said. “At the high school outside Window Rock.”

The music faded with a final twang. The announcer broke in, with the same sense of urgency. Naomi froze. Lola stepped to her side, took the spatula from her hand, and turned the pancake. Another song, this time traditional. Naomi’s breath caught. “It’s an honor song.” The wailing tune rose above the drum’s parade beat as the singers gave tribute to those who had passed on.

Lola slid the pancake onto a plate and offered it to Thomas. He waved it away. “Not hungry,” he said.

Lola was always hungry. The way you eat, you should be the size of a house, Charlie had often marveled. She slathered the pancake with butter, drowned it with syrup, and dug in. Thomas turned the pad back over and jotted more notes. Lola nodded toward it. “What’s that?”

“I thought I could get a jump start on next semester, maybe collect stuff for a paper about these bombings for my political science class. The meeting should give me some good information.”

Lola would have thought the information would better apply to a criminology class, and said as much.

Thomas’s mouth twisted downward. “People will be scoring political points all over the place at this meeting. People who like the mine, people who hate it. I’ll be up even later tonight than I was last night. Studying.”

Naomi nodded approval. “It’ll be good practice for you to see how something like that works. The more you learn about tribal government now, the better.”

She’d said Thomas would go to law school. Apparently politics was next on the agenda, Lola thought. Once again, she found herself hoping Thomas was on board with the plan. “Where’s Window Rock?” she asked. She’d studied a map of the reservation during their drive down, but beyond being impressed at its immense size, sprawling into three states and surrounding the Hopi Reservation, she had little concept of what was where.

“It’s on the New Mexico border, a couple of hours away. They’re going to hold the meeting this afternoon to give people from all over the reservation time to get there, and then get home again safe. Window Rock’s near Gallup,” Naomi said, as though that explained something.

Lola lifted a shoulder. “So?”

“Gallup’s off-rez.”

Lola’s shoulder fell. “Oh.”

Naomi didn’t have to say anything else. The Navajo Reservation, like so many, was dry. The outskirts of Gallup, then, would be lined with liquor stores run by people who self-righteously proclaimed that no one forced their customers to overindulge. Lola thought of people going into town to tie one on, and then making the two-hour drive home—or more, depending on where they lived—weaving their way through the blackness on unlit two-lane roads, maybe with kids and elders in the car. The shoulders of rural roads all over the West were dotted with white crosses. Indian reservations, with their disproportionate struggles with alcoholism, too often featured whole forests of the grim markers.

“We’ll want to get on the road early, then.” Lola’s words were a reminder to herself, but she spoke aloud.

Naomi resumed her station at the stove, turning pancakes with renewed assurance. “Gar! Charlie! Girls!” she called. “Lola’s eating your breakfast. Sorry,” she said to Lola as the others entered the kitchen, the girls shouldering their way past their fathers. Juliana went directly to Thomas and wrapped her arms around one of his legs. He reached down and hugged her.

“We’ve all got a long day ahead of us,” Naomi said. “But you won’t have anything to worry about. You’ll be long gone by the time the meeting starts. And besides, your route home doesn’t take you anywhere near Window Rock, so there won’t be any traffic.” She pulled four plates from the cupboard and placed a pancake on each.

Margaret looked from Naomi to Lola. “We’re going home?”

“You’re going home?” echoed Thomas. The closest thing Lola had seen to a smile crossed his face.

“Yes,” Edgar answered for Lola. “They’re going home.”

Lola permitted herself a small smile in return. “No,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

Lola tapped into the domestic goddess buried very deeply within, once again taking the spatula from Naomi. She urged her to sit with the others. “After all,” she said, the sweetness dripping from her voice rivaling that of the syrup that Charlie sloshed across his plate, “you’re putting us up. We should be waiting on you.”

“That’s right.” Charlie threw Lola a look that told her he didn’t know what she was up to, but that he was willing to go along. He poured orange juice. “Margaret? Juliana? Big glass or little?”

“Little, please,” said Juliana. Margaret’s eyes narrowed to slits. Like her father, she knew something was up. Unlike him, she’d yet to acquire a poker face.

Lola saw the storm clouds gathering above Margaret, ready to rain questions, and moved quickly to clear them. “We can see that you two are going to be buried with work, at least until somebody catches this guy,” she said to Naomi and Edgar. “It only makes sense that we stay and help you out on the home front.” Margaret’s eyebrows shot skyward. All Lola had done was raise more questions in her daughter’s mind. Lola turned to Naomi and inserted the knife. “And the girls are getting along so well. Juliana is Margaret’s only cousin—only first cousin,” she quickly amended. As far as she could tell, Indian people regarded every other member of their tribe as some sort of cousin. She jiggled the knife. “It seems a shame to rob them of this time together.”

“I don’t know—” Edgar began. He’d yet to tame his hair into its styled pompadour and it stood up in clumps. A few unshaven hairs bristled from his chin. He rubbed the back of his hand against them.

“Our talk last night,” Lola said to him. “That made it easy to stay.”

“What talk?” Naomi and Charlie said together.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Lola said. “So I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Eddie—Gar—was up, too. Somehow we got into the importance of family. It made me realize how crazy it would be to squander this time, even if we adults don’t get to see much of one another.” Lola turned back to the stove so Edgar wouldn’t see the way her saccharine smile kept twitching toward a wolfish grin. Nothing like a giant unspoken fuck you to start the day, she thought.

Quickly, while the room was still awash in good feeling, however feigned, Lola gave the knife a last twist. “And we’d like to go to the meeting today, too.”

“What was that about?”

Charlie stood next to Lola at the sink, his arms deep in soapy water. Beside him, Lola wielded a towel on the clean dishes. Naomi had urged them to use the dishwasher, but Charlie insisted upon washing them by hand. “Cleaner that way,” he said, casually insulting Naomi’s Miele.

“You won’t believe what your brother said to me last night,” Lola whispered. Quickly, with an eye on the door, she recounted her conversation with Edgar. “There’s something weird going on here. Everything all nicey-nice by day, and then we get the bum’s rush.”

There was that business with Juliana and the key chain, too. Lola started to say something, then thought better of it. Somehow, it felt like a betrayal to the girl. She’d wait until the subject of the bookbag came up on its own.

Charlie dunked another dish in the rinse water and handed it to Lola. “Eddie can be full of himself. I remember him before he was a jerk. He and I need to get back to that place. So I’m glad you want to stay. Maybe we can work things out.”

Lola polished the dish until it shone. “I thought maybe you were jealous.”

A plate slipped from Charlie’s hands and fell back into the water with a splash. “Of what?”

“His law degree. This.” Lola flapped the towel at the kitchen—the polished stone countertops, Mexican-tile backsplash, and stainless appliances insistently bringing to mind their own kitchen, stuck in the linoleum and avocado-appliance era of Charlie’s parents. “Her.”

Charlie withdrew his arms from the water, shook off the soapsuds, and wrapped them around Lola. Damp seeped through her shirt. “What good would fancy degrees do me in Magpie? They’d just price me out of the one place where I want to live. And what would you do with a kitchen like this? Cook? I don’t think so.” Lola, her face buried in his chest, let a laugh escape. “As to her—if you ever start running around in makeup and designer jeans, I’ll know you’ve taken up with some other guy. Because this one likes you the way you are. Well, except for the fact that you are a little pale.”

Lola pulled free, gave the dishtowel a twirl, and popped it against his butt. She danced away laughing as he came after her with a pan of soapy water, threatening to dump it over that curly head of hers if he could only catch her.

“Whoa,” Charlie said, behind her. “We’ve got company.”

Margaret and Juliana stood in the doorway, Margaret shaking her head at her parents’ antics with the resigned patience of one entirely too familiar with the scenario. Juliana looked baffled.

“It’s okay,” Lola reassured her. “Your Uncle Charlie is a bit of a goofball, that’s all.”

“Auntie Lola is the one who’s the goofball,” Charlie said.

Something swelled up within Lola. Auntie. A term much in use on the reservation, applied to the women who occupied the indeterminate range between young marrieds and elders, Auntie was a term of respect, one that Lola had never thought of as applying to herself.

Apparently she wasn’t the only one.

Juliana’s faced smoothed as she returned to more surefooted ground. “Daddy says I don’t have to call you Aunt. I can just call you Lola.” A remark that somehow stung more than all the other insults Lola had endured since her arrival in Arizona.

Apparently unaware of the effect of her words, Juliana prattled on. “Mom and Dad are leaving early for the meeting. Can I go later with you? We can stop and see the dinosaur tracks on the way. I know where they are.”

“I don’t know—” Lola began. What if the crime scene tape was still up? Or the rocks still bloodstained?

“Canyon de Chelly’s on the way, too.” Juliana rushed on, undeterred. “We can stop and look for a few minutes. But if you want to go down into it, you need a guide, just like yesterday. Only it’s bigger, way bigger. We should go back there another day.”

Maybe, Lola thought as her niece basked in her own expertise, Juliana was just trying to curry favor after their middle-of-the-night standoff. She decided to follow the girl’s lead. “Probably not today. We’ll be leaving Bub home long enough as is. But I’d love for you to show us another time.” At least Juliana seemed to have no qualms about spending the rest of the day with her. She wished Juliana’s parents felt the same way.