Jalen arrives at six o’clock with a toolbox in his hands. A toolbox. It seems a strange thing to bring to dinner, but then I guess if I’d wanted a flowers-and-candy kind of guy, I would have stayed with Aaron Dunning.
No regrets there, especially now, looking at Jalen. His black hair is pulled tightly back and shows off his strong facial bones and his deep-set onyx eyes. His black shorts and T-shirt look freshly ironed. The care he’s taken with his appearance, more than anything that shows on his face, tells me that tonight is important to him and he wants to make a good impression.
“You look nice,” I say and step forward to hug him. Until now, I didn’t realize how part of me expected him to change his mind about us, even after what happened in the Navajo Nation.
The hug is quick, slightly awkward, as if we’re about to get caught doing something we shouldn’t. Yet the pieces of what we are, what we could be to each other, are there.
“You look nice, too.” His eyes linger on the red peasant blouse cinched around my waist. A happy tingle goes through me. When he lifts his gaze to mine, I feel it in my stomach.
“So what’s with the toolbox? We’re feeding you—not making you work.” He smells of rain and soap and something that has become my favorite scent in the world.
“Your father will appreciate this more.”
“Appreciate what more?” My father suddenly looms behind me. He extends his hand in greeting. “Good to see you, Jalen. Come on in.”
My father was not around for the whole Aaron Dunning chapter in my life, and I really don’t know what to expect from him tonight. Maybe I should have warned him. Told him that Jalen was going to tell him about us. With Aaron, I took great pride in excluding my dad from any information which would have given him the opportunity to hand out advice or approval. But most of all, I wanted my exclusion to hurt him. Sorry, Dad, I can’t talk now, is what I’d say when he called. I have a date.
Jalen steps inside and immediately the entranceway shrinks. He has at least three inches over my father who, at six feet, has always seemed tall to me.
Jalen carries the toolbox into the kitchen and sets it on the counter next to a stack of archeology magazines that probably go back several years.
“Soda? Juice? Water?” my father asks, opening the cabinet and taking out one of the four glasses he owns. They’re the cheap, unbreakable kind, just slightly nicer than plastic, but at least they’re clean.
“Water, please,” Jalen says and leans against the counter. He slouches, but his eyes are alert. “Thanks,” he adds as my father hands him the glass.
“Well,” my father says, opening a beer. “What project has Paige talked you into doing?”
Jalen and I exchange puzzled glances, and then I remember the toolbox. For a moment I want to laugh. Sometimes my father can be so clueless. “He’s not here to work, Dad.”
Jalen straightens. “I do want to work…but that’s not why I’m here.” He looks at me and then back to my father. “Paige and I want to see each other. Go out,” he adds, and then, in the silence that follows, adds very seriously so there will be no doubt, “I would like to date your daughter.”
It isn’t as firm as what I’d hoped he’s say, but we’d argued a little about this earlier. I thought asking for permission was old-fashioned and silly. It was my choice, not my dad’s, but Jalen said it was a way of showing respect. No matter what I said, it wouldn’t change his mind. There’s a depth of stubbornness to him I am just beginning to understand.
My father takes off his glasses, cleans them on the hem of his shirt almost as if he’s trying to fill time while he figures out what to say. “Well,” he says and holds up his glass of sweet tea. “Congratulations!”
He says it loudly, as if we all have gone hard of hearing. The moment that follows is awkward, but at least the worst is over.
At dinner, we eat very well done steaks, baked potatoes, and blackened corn. We talk about progress on the restoration project, the recent sighting of a relatively rare owl by one of the park rangers, and Jalen’s family. Throughout it all, Jalen answers everything, but uses as few words as humanly possible. I’m relieved when my father starts rambling on about the discovery of skeletal remains in Ethiopia that suggest early hominoids were able to climb trees as well as walk upright.
After dinner, Jalen takes out his toolbox and we start hanging pictures that have probably been resting against the wall since the day my father moved in here. We hang them more or less above the spots where they’ve been leaning. My mom would have known exactly where they belonged and done a much better job, but seeing them on the wall is a huge improvement.
In the dining room, Dad and Jalen space out three framed Audubon prints—a duck, a pheasant, and a turkey—that used to hang in our dining room back in New Jersey. It was a room we never used much, except on holidays. For a moment I let myself fantasize that my mom and dad will get back together, and we’ll be a family again. My father will carve the Thanksgiving turkey so slowly and carefully it’ll be like he’s excavating bones. My mom will keep telling him to hurry before the butter peas and mashed potatoes go stone-cold, and my grandparents will laugh as if everything is funny and refill the champagne glasses.
Jalen straightens the final print. “What do you think?”
“Good,” I say. “Dad?”
He nods and rubs his hand over the rough, blond stubble just beginning to cover his chin. “They’re good for now,” he says, “but I never really felt right about eating turkey while the damn bird was on the wall watching.” He laughs, though, his first one of the night, and maybe, I think, the first real one since I’ve arrived.
We move to my father’s office, where Jalen hammers a spring hanger into the wall for an oversized watercolor called The Seven Navajo Bows. My father’s face lights up as he retells the story—how a maiden lived alone and one day Coyote came to visit. When they ran out of meat, the maiden used a magic horn to call spirit hunters and armed them with the seven bows and seven arrows hanging above her fireplace. The hunters brought back meat. Coyote stole the horn, but the warriors, loyal to the maiden, turned against him and Coyote had to flee.
Jalen has heard this story—only, in the version he tells us, the spirit hunters are the maiden’s brothers and the magic horn is a windpipe. Coyote stole the windpipe multiple times, and ultimately, when he used it to call the spirit hunters, a swarm of bees emerged instead and stung Coyote, who ran off into the forest. The next thing I know, my father and my boyfriend are talking Native American mythology and Jalen’s face has become animated, his sentences longer, his shoulders relaxed.
To illustrate a point, my father pulls his textbook, Footsteps in the Past, off the bookshelf behind his desk and begins flipping through the chapters.
“That’s Paige,” my father says, pointing at one of the photographs. “She had to be, like, six or seven in that one.”
“Dad…” I try to grab the book, but Jalen lifts it out of my reach. “Stop it,” I say, laughing. It feels good, though, to get the attention. I was happy back then. In the back of my brain, Mrs. Shum’s voice tells me to look at who I was in order to know who I want to become. I know suddenly what that means.
The phone rings as my dad is showing Jalen a picture of a collapsed pit house. I remember my father re-laying the roof while Emily and I danced beneath, conjuring up spirits as we hopped the beams of light.
“Excuse me.” With the phone pressed to his ear, my father walks out of the office.
Jalen sets my father’s textbook on the shelf and pulls another book off the shelf.
“Dad likes you,” I say, moving closer.
He doesn’t look up, but the corners of his mouth lift. “He’s cool.” He reads the back cover of a book, resets it on the shelf, and then pulls out another one. “Think he’d let me borrow something?”
“Are you kidding? He’d be thrilled.”
He puts the book aside and returns his attention to the shelf, running his fingers along the spines. He doesn’t seem to get that we’re alone. I shove his shoulder playfully. “Put the book down and talk to me.”
Pushing him, however, is like trying to move an oak, and he seems completely absorbed in the book in his hands.
“Come on, Jalen,” I say.
He looks up. I freeze. He’s scowling deeply and his eyes are dark, almost angry. For a second I think he’s mad at me, and then his gaze returns to the book. “Half of the first page is missing,” he says. He holds it up. On the cover is a picture of a girl with long blonde hair tied in braids. The title reads, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares.
“So?”
“Half the first page is missing,” He repeats.
A chill passes through me as it hits home that the missing page to this book might be the one we found tucked into Emily’s sneaker.
“Give me that.” I grab the book. He’s right. The second page mentions that guy, Jude, that Master of Eyes. “You don’t know that this is the same book.” But we both know it is. So what’s it doing on my father’s shelf? I hug myself tightly to fight the feeling that I’m falling into a hole deeper and more despairing than the one Emily and I stumbled into all those years ago.