I stood in the middle of the room, still holding the denim skirt. Chewie lay in the doorway, nose on his front paws. The spinning ceiling fan offered little relief from the rising humidity.
“Fynn didn’t tell you,” Natalie said. She sank to the edge of the bed and fiddled with her earring. “When I talked to your dad the other day,” she explained, “he—we decided to convert the back porch into a room for him so Fynn and I could move in here.”
“What’s wrong with Fynn’s room?” I asked. “You guys have seemed happy enough sleeping there since your fourth date.”
It had just slipped out. That happens sometimes. My mouth malfunctions.
I wiped the sweat from the back of my neck. The previous month, Fynn had ripped out the window-unit air conditioner from our parents’ bedroom and hooked it up in his Domain to cool down his precious computer equipment. Never mind the discomfort to us humans or the dog.
“You need to talk to your brother,” Natalie whispered.
What does that mean? I wondered, staring at her worn face. She seemed so tired lately, so different, down to her meatier diet. The heat seemed to be getting to her, even more than to me.
Suddenly, it all made sense. Natalie’s shadowed eyes, the all-new, pressed, and buttoned-down Fynn. Their short, stressful engagement. Fynn and Natalie were moving into my parents’ room so Fynn’s could become a nursery for their baby. Natalie was pregnant and had been for some time.
Fynn should’ve told me. I was family.
Besides, Natalie would need me, and not just for diapering. I’d grown up in Hannesburg, and I knew people already had to be talking about her being some spoiled Johnson County girl. And never mind that a quarter or so of the women in town were single mothers. In Hannesburg, Natalie was still considered an outsider. And Fynn was a hometown boy, one of the few with a future who hadn’t moved away. Lorelei in particular would be sure to broadcast her feelings on the subject.
I blew out a long breath and told Natalie, “No, my brother needs to talk to me.”
Her Mother’s Daughter
FROM MY JOURNAL:
“What are the goals of the program?” the Flash asked Aunt Georgia.
“To give these kids a chance to get together, learn a thing or two, build a bridge. Maybe we’ll watch a movie.” She chuckled. “Oh, and to have fun. Eat up my cooking.”
They’d pulled up a couple of chairs at the foot of the stage. I couldn’t resist eavesdropping from behind the curtains as I changed my film.
“What are the challenges?” he asked Aunt Georgia.
“Right now, we’re looking at only a few days and a pretty diverse group,” she replied. “I’ve never put together anything like this before. Maybe I should be doing it differently somehow. But mostly, I just think these kids need one another.”
I wasn’t sure what Aunt Georgia meant, and she didn’t explain.
JUNE 30
The museum was Hannesburg’s original city hall, built with the town in the early 1900s. Though the sign outside read PRESERVING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE, the building served more often as a spot for weddings and baby showers. But I’d always liked its feeling of history. The two-story ceiling. The heavy red curtain bordering the stage. Even the cheap but cheerful kitchenette.
Aunt Georgia had brought in oversized pillows and plopped them on the stage like splotches of paint. Marie chose a navy pillow between Dmitri’s lime and Spence’s burgundy. Queenie picked the yellow one on the other side of Spence. They slipped into their journals, while I skimmed the circle, shooting, staying in the shadows, and the Flash researched other Native youth cultural and tribal language programs based across the continent.
Later, Aunt Georgia reached into her backpack. She took out two two-pound boxes of spaghetti, a one-pound plastic bag of rubber bands, two wooden rulers, and a bottle of glue. It made an odd pile on the stage floor.
“I’ve been thinking,” Aunt Georgia said. “You kids could build a bridge.” A pasta bridge, from the looks of things. “Say twenty-four inches long,” she added, “weighing no more than a pound. We’ll see how strong you can make it.”
Queenie twisted the orange glue cap. “You heard her,” she said. “Think strong.”
Spence and Marie reached for the rulers. Dmitri started sketching in his journal, working in suggestions from the group. The Flash followed Aunt Georgia to the kitchenette, and I trailed after them in case she needed help with lunch.
“When you first thought of the road trip,” the Flash began, “did you think it would be a way for these teenagers to maintain ties to their heritage?”
That’s what Natalie calls “feeding a line.” Instead of quoting the source directly, the reporter writes something like “Wilhelm said the road trip would be an opportunity for the American Indian teenagers to maintain ties to their cultural heritage.”
Aunt Georgia chuckled. “The first thing I thought was, Ten days with my husband, a handful of teenagers, and a rental minivan? Good luck with that, Georgia! Good luck with that!”
The Flash dutifully recorded the quote and then kept his pen poised. His eyes were pure puppy dog, begging the way Chewie’s did for Chinese takeout.
“All right,” Aunt Georgia said. “I know you’re here to do a job.” She paused a moment before continuing. “First off, Ojibwe is the cultural heritage of only a few of the kids—this is an intertribal group, and most of them know a whole heap more about their Nations than I’d have any right to. But this camp is a good deal about science, and agriculture is sure enough a science. That may not be how your people back in St. Louis think of it. But if you ask around here, folks’ll tell you that’s how it is.” She seemed to anticipate his next question. “That’s not all it is with the wild-rice harvest, but you’ll have to call Dmitri and Marie’s mama to see if she’ll tell you more. It’s not up to me.”
I could guess that the harvest was part of Ojibwe traditional life—past, present, and future. That being the case, it most likely had some spiritual importance. Aunt Georgia was hinting to the Flash that it might be best for an outsider to leave the details alone. I wasn’t sure if he understood her or not.
The Flash seemed about to ask another question. He opened his mouth and then closed it again, apparently undecided. Then he read back over his quotes.
Aunt Georgia punched the play button on her boom box, and Dolly Parton began singing about Jesus and gravity. “Young man,” Aunt Georgia added, popping a bowl into the microwave, “I hope you can stomach my cooking.”
“Thanks,” the Flash answered, “but I can’t accept anything from a source.”
“You what?” I asked, shocked at his manners.
“It’s a rule,” he informed me, sticking his pen behind his ear. “If you don’t believe me, Shooter, you’re free to ask Nat.”
Six minutes later, the microwave beeped, and Aunt Georgia lifted the lid off of the bowl, releasing the smell of homemade chicken noodle soup. I lined up with Spence and Queenie for lunch.
“Maybe I should call Nat,” the Flash said, “just in case.”
“No time like the Pez-ent,” Spence agreed as Dmitri and Marie walked over.
“Is he always like that?” Dmitri asked, his eyes tracking the Flash’s departure.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “We met yesterday.”
Taking the hint from Spence, Marie gave us all a Pez candy from a Tweety dispenser. “I like his coat,” she said.
After Aunt Georgia served up our bowls, I took a seat on the stage between the Headbirds. Queenie had run out with Spence to fetch the cooler of Cokes from the back of Aunt Georgia’s station wagon.
As I was raising my first spoonful of broth, the Flash returned and announced, “Nat says that as long as it’s edible, drinkable, or under ten bucks, I’m good to go.”
He’d been commuting to Hannesburg every day from his frat house in Lawrence. He’d already mentioned twice that the house mom had summers off. I suspected it’d been a while since his last home-cooked
meal.
Since I didn’t really want to talk to anybody, I’d taken to leaving my phone at home.
When I finally bothered to check messages, the caller said, “Cassidy Rain, this is Mrs. Owen again. Please give me a call. I must prepare to counter Mrs. Wilhelm’s proposed city expenditure, and I can’t very well discuss it with her, now can I?”
Somebody needed to tell Mrs. Owen that stalking was illegal.
No doubt she’d heard by now that I was covering Indian Camp for the paper, and she’d known all along that I’d have inside information. But I had no intention of sitting down and giving her the ammo she needed to defeat Aunt Georgia.
I hit the button to delete.
The next call was from Dad, who said, “It’s a beautiful eighty degrees today here at Andersen Air Force Base.” He congratulated me on my photo gig with the Examiner and made me promise to send him my published images.
I brought up Natalie only once, just long enough to give her credit for letting me shoot the story.
Dad brought up Fynn only once, just long enough to mention how my brother had wanted me to join Indian Camp. “You’re the smart one,” Dad concluded. “Photography is your future. Don’t let what anybody says convince you otherwise. A person shouldn’t let her heritage hold her back.”
I didn’t say anything, just held tightly to the phone and listened as he kept lecturing. I couldn’t even come up with an “I love you, too” when we traded good-byes.
After hanging up, I sat up on my quilt and looked toward the top shelf of my bookcase, from the photo of Mom flying a long-tailed kite to the one of Dad posed in front of a C-130.
It’d been a long time since Dad and I had shared a “Yes, sir!” kind of moment.
At Indian Camp, the Flash had given me a copy of the Fourth of July tab and told me that Natalie had driven to Kansas City to have high tea and to debate wedding plans with her mother on the Country Club Plaza.
Alice’s tea party in Wonderland didn’t last as long. At 9:30, Natalie still wasn’t back.
In his Domain, Fynn cranked up the volume on a Meat Loaf song. I could hear it through my open window, over the rotating fan that blew across a cookie pan I’d filled with ice water.
I’d been lying on my bedroom carpet in front of the fan, reading. When I finished Natalie’s article on local veterans, I remembered my voice recorder. Dad had given it to me the previous Christmas, saying he often missed the sound of my voice. I’d sent one audio letter right away but none since Galen’s death.
When I opened my hope chest, I saw Mom’s tear dress, folded with even corners beneath the voice recorder, my Bible, my unanswered mail, and an envelope of old photos. Natalie must have placed the dress in there, I realized. She’d had some idea of how much it meant.
Pressing the play button on the recorder, I began: “Hi, Dad. You asked the other day about Natalie. It’s nice having another girl in the house. I can talk to her like I would a big sister.”
Natalie’s VW converta-Bug chugged into the gravel driveway, and I clicked the stop button.
Fynn’s stereo blasted, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” Fynn was working on the promo site for Not Your Wild West Show. He only listens to the vintage Bat Out of Hell albums when he’s on deadline. And when Fynn’s on deadline, it’s best to leave him alone. Under the circumstances, Natalie would know better than to venture into his Domain. At least I hoped so.
I found her sitting on the front porch step. The screen door banged behind me, startling Chewie, who sprang from her side into the crabgrass.
Natalie didn’t turn, didn’t move at all. I moved slowly, shocked by what I saw.
She’d taken out her pirate earring. She’d traded in her T-shirt, overalls, and hiking boots for a white cotton dress, sheer white hose, and black patent flats. Her hair had been curled, like with a curling iron, and I suspected the use of hair spray—aerosol hair spray.
As I sat on it, the porch swing creaked. I peeled a bit of paint off of my left thumbnail, hoping the marriage proposal hadn’t been panic talking. “Natalie,” I said, “I know about the baby.”
Her thin shoulders slumped slightly. She turned to look at me, and the bones of her face looked skull-like. Sharp. “Fynn finally told you?”
“Figured it out myself,” I said, not sure it had been my place to bring up the subject. When she didn’t answer, I added, “Did you have a good tea?”
Natalie pushed up from the stairs and joined me on the swing. “You’ve met my mom,” she said. “Unwed mothers are one of her pet rants.”
Sounded serious. “Did you tell her Fynn was on the Dean’s List at KU?” I asked.
“Next time,” she said, “I’ll lead with it.”
As the breeze rattled our wind chime, we swung side by side.
“She just doesn’t understand me,” Natalie announced. “She wants me to get a PR job like hers in some color-coordinated office at a high-end agency. Had one all lined up, too, with the wife of one of Dad’s golfing buddies from the club. Mom thinks I took the offer at the Examiner just to upset her. She thinks I’m just rebelling from subdivision life.”
I remembered my one lunch with the Lewises. It was the same week Fynn had gone corporate, and he’d fit right in at the country club in Overland Park. But before we’d left Hannesburg, Natalie had told him it wasn’t necessary to get so dressed up. That day, she’d worn her overalls and okayed my ladybug-patch jeans.
In a conversation mostly made up of criticizing Natalie’s outfit, quizzing Fynn about his computer business, and toasting the Lewises’ yard for being recognized as “Lawn of the Month,” her mother had managed to bring up the phrase “living in sin” twice.
I couldn’t help wondering if Mrs. Lewis had been right about Natalie rebelling against the suburbs and whether Natalie’s moving in with Fynn had been part of it. I hoped not. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” I asked. “About the baby, I mean.”
“Fynn and I argued about it,” she explained, watching Chewie chase the fireflies. “Neither of us wanted to tell anybody about the baby until my second month. If something is going to go wrong with a pregnancy, it usually happens early. But Fynn didn’t want to tell you only half the truth, and I wanted to announce the engagement right away.”
She seemed so lost, and suddenly, I felt like the older, more mature one. More than anything, I wanted to shield Natalie and the baby from any bullet words, no matter if they came from local gossips, mother-daughter tea parties, or my own big brother’s Domain. I was going to be an aunt. The baby had become my top priority.
“How was your doctor’s appointment?” I asked.
“Eight weeks and counting,” Natalie reported.
The wind carried Meat Loaf’s “Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back.”
Trailer Park Dreams
FROM MY JOURNAL:
The night of the Winter Enchantment Extravaganza, I was the cardboard snowflake who asked the Holiday Queen for permission to touch her braided hair.
“You may,” she answered, gracing my shoulder with the crimson star at the end of her plastic glitter wand.
I tugged off one white glove and raised my fingertips to the weave over her ear, careful not to disturb Queenie’s rhinestone tiara.
Mama had caught sight of me doing it, and we had a talk.
Now I know better than to ask. I’m extra respectful about Black folks’ hair.
Native folks are sensitive about our hair, too.
Back then, me and Queenie, we were so little. Only five years old. And we’d been friends even before that.
JULY 1
Queenie walked into the museum and greeted all with “What do you know?”
Marie looked up from her navy pillow and answered, “The name Pez is from the first, middle, and last letters of pfefferminz, the German word for ‘peppermint.’”
I made a mental note: Marie knew how to speak to people in their own languages, and Queenie had found a new friend. I told myself I di
dn’t care and attached my lens to shoot from the far-right-hand corner of the stage.
During their interview with the Flash, Dmitri and Marie seemed shy. They spoke in soft voices, avoided his eyes, and sat on their pillows at angles away from him. But they still answered about growing up in Minneapolis and on the Leech Lake Reservation. They told him that their people were called the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe and sometimes the Chippewa. They spelled the tribal names, and they told him about harvesting wild rice from the rivers and lakes. Their father was a trader and mechanic, Marie said. Their mother would begin classes at Haskell in the fall.
When Aunt Georgia had first mentioned the trip to the Headbirds’ reservation, I’d wondered why she had decided on it. But after hearing Dmitri and Marie talk, I realized it wasn’t just me who felt like part of her was someplace else. Going home meant something, like with Mom and me heading down to Oklahoma.
I wondered then if Marie and Dmitri weren’t exactly shy. Maybe they felt like they shouldn’t have to explain themselves. Like they didn’t particularly care if Hannesburg got a glimpse into their lives. Aunt Georgia was always polite, but she didn’t seem overly thrilled to have the Flash around all the time. Of course when she’d said he could sit in, Aunt Georgia couldn’t have known he’d plan to do a whole feature project, instead of just a regular news story. Her understanding had been that he’d be out of the way in an hour or two.
Just then, it was clear that I’d made a mistake by pulling the Examiner into Indian Camp. Worse, I was probably the reason Aunt Georgia was putting up with the Flash being there. My fault, not his.
Meanwhile, Queenie and Spence hauled in a foldout table from the storage closet. Then Dmitri and Marie carefully transferred the newspaper-covered cardboard supporting all three parts of the soon-to-be connected pasta bridge from the stage to the table in the center of the museum.
After I’d left the day before, the Indian Campers had apparently morphed into a dedicated pasta construction team. Each brace of the bridge was ten noodles thick, held together with rubber bands and secured with glue in crisscross patterns. One problem—Marie had poured on the glue, using up a fourth of the bottle.
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