This is what I know about love.
My grandfather owned a small tire and auto parts shop on the Navajo Nation. It had been going under for as long as my father could remember. One afternoon, Grandfather asked my father and uncle to take an order of tires to a garage in Phoenix. They had car trouble along the way, and so they arrived just a little after closing. The owner of the garage saw them, locked the door, and flipped a closed sign in the window. When my father called to him through the glass, the owner told them to come back the next morning. My father explained they had driven five hours and it would take them only fifteen minutes to unload the tires. He did not mention that they could not afford either the lost time or the cost of the gasoline, although that probably was understood by everyone.
What happened next is less clear. There was more arguing through the glass, a sour comment about reading the clock versus following the sun, and then my uncle slammed his fist through the window and turned the closed sign to open.
My father, with the stacks of tires still strapped in the bed of the pickup, drove my uncle to the nearest emergency room. There, a nurse with soft, brown eyes and hair like black silk helped pick the glass from Uncle Billy’s hand. By the time my uncle’s hand was ready to be stitched, my father had the nurse’s telephone number and a promise to have dinner. They were married three weeks later.
He said it happened like that for his father and his father before him. The men in our family fall immediately, irrevocably in love, or not at all.
I was not raised on the reservation. Through my mother, my father found work in construction, and they bought a small house in the suburbs. When my grandparents still lived, we used to visit them on the Nation. They lived in a one-room hogan and there was no running water, but it smelled of fresh, warm kneeldown bread. Before dawn, my father and grandfather would wake me, and we would walk to the top of the hill and watch the sun rise.
If you drive to the Navajo Nation, it is not uncommon to see people, mostly teenagers, hitchhiking their way out. Although the land sits on top of deposits of natural gas, uranium, and minerals, jobs are scarce. Unemployment runs high. There is little government funding. Basically, we’re on our own. Alcohol factors into most of the crimes, and the high school dropout rate is high.
Despite these problems, or maybe because of them, I see myself going back there someday, living there. What I’ll do is still a question in my mind. My grandfather’s garage is long gone, of course, but it isn’t automobiles I dream of fixing. I think, mostly, what needs fixing is me.
I don’t know much about love, but I do know about wanting. About wanting a girl who isn’t right for you, but not being able to help it. You try to ignore, rationalize, deny, but it’s there—like a thirst that burns your throat or a dream you don’t want to wake up from.
You will fall in love, but you won’t help her and she’s going to die. My uncle was drunk when he said those words, but how can I dismiss them? How can I hope that he was confused about the whole falling-in-love thing and Emily Linton was the doomed girl in his vision? How do I tell Paige? What if I don’t? What if it’s already too late?