by Lisa Wingate
“Okay,” Benjamin chirped, scanning my car with his bright polished-agate eyes, looking for something interesting to do. Frowning at the lack of available kid-entertainment, he rubbed the short dark hair that matched his dad’s, then tried holding a piece out between his thumb and forefinger, so he could see it. “Mama, what hair I got?”
“Purple hair with pink polka dots,” Shasta answered, then closed his door and climbed into the passenger seat, groaning as she swung her legs onto the floorboard. She tucked her purse and a diaper bag beside the console before buckling the seat belt around her stomach. “I feel like a tank.”
“This car’s just hard to get into,” I said, wondering again what it would be like to be her—wife, mother, participant in the yearly Reid family reunion, member of the tribe. I wanted to be her, and then I didn’t. I suspected she felt the same way about me.
Benjamin finished trying to examine his hair and was bored by the time I started the engine. “I no got poke-dots!” he squealed. “What hair I got?”
“Black, like your daddy,” his mother answered, then checked over her shoulder as I backed out of the parking space. “Sorry,” she said to me. “In our family, you get used to looking for kids behind the car.”
“Ours, too.” Aunt Kate’s kids were spread just far enough apart in age that we’d had a preschooler around the house for years. Now that the last one was school-aged, we were starting over with Jenilee’s baby.
“I wan’ toy,” Benjamin whined from the backseat. Since we weren’t even out of the campground yet, that didn’t bode well for the trip.
“Oh, Benji, your toy bag is in the back of the truck.” Shasta’s tone was a mirror of Benjamin’s—whiney and latently miserable. She reached into the diaper bag and dug around with one hand. “Nope. Nothing in there but diapers, wipes, clothes, and a hairbrush. Dad took off with all your toys.” Dad took on the aura of a dirty word, and Shasta zipped up the diaper bag with a vengeance. “You’d think he might have checked before he left with everything.”
Opening the console, I looked for something Benjamin might like and came up with an extra set of keys and an old cell phone. “Here you go.” I stretched into the backseat before we pulled out of the park entrance. “Want to play with my phone?”
“Woooo!” Benjamin’s hands clapped in rapid succession, and his eyes widened as I set the phone and the keys in his lap. He picked up the phone and started pressing buttons. “Mommy, I got cep-ha-wone!”
“Don’t push anything.” Shasta cast a worried glance. “You might not want to let him play with that. He’s likely to call China or someplace. He’s pretty good with electronics and things. Mama already has him using baby computer games at her office.”
In the mirror, I watched Benjamin clutch the cell phone to his chest and frown at his mother. “S’mine.” Grabbing the keys, he tried to give them back, instead. “You keys.”
“It’s okay,” I assured Shasta. “It’s an old phone. I had the service turned off and got prepaid wireless because I was out of the country for a couple years.”
Shasta drew back, her face brightening with obvious fascination. I could imagine what she was thinking—adopted spoiled rich kid, bumming around the globe on Mom and Dad’s money while searching for herself and answers to long-buried genetic questions. “Really? Where at?”
“Europe for a year, and then Ukraine.” It seemed like fiction, sitting here in a car, driving a county road miles from the nearest airport or city. “Europe was a student exchange orchestra. Not as big of a deal as it sounds. We played concert halls, political events, graduations, things like that. We got to see a lot. One of the girls I met there was headed on to Ukraine for a year with an orphans’ mission, and I just…I don’t know…went along.”
“That must have been kind of sad—at the orphanage, I mean,” Shasta mused. Her face was soft and contemplative, sympathetic. “I saw a report about those orphanages on 60 Minutes once. Is it really like they show on TV, all those cribs lined up, with babies that just lie there all day long, and never get out? When they showed that on TV, I cried for two days, and Cody thought I was nuts. I kept thinking about Benji, and what if that were him? If I didn’t have a baby to take care of and one on the way, I would have hopped on a plane and gone to that orphanage and just sat there all day, hugging kids. I got our Sunday-school class to start raising money and collecting shoes to send over.”
“They’ll be needed,” I said. “It’s incredibly cold in the winter. Many of the orphanages can’t take the kids outside, because they don’t have warm clothes and shoes. Where we were, in Sumy, the kids in the Internat—that’s what they call an orphanage for older kids—know almost nothing about the outside world, and then when they graduate ninth grade, they have to leave and try to go find a way to make a living. Our missionary program tried to teach them some arts, computer skills, and proficiency in English, which hopefully will help them have some chance of finding work. But they’re still so young….” The sentence trailed off, probably better left unfinished. Shasta’s eyes were welling up. It wouldn’t help to tell her where a lot of the kids raised in orphanages ended up. When kids left the Spencers’ program, Mr. Spencer sent them off with an invitation to return for Sunday services and a promise that if they were ever desperate, they had only to knock on the door, and he would find some way to feed and shelter them. He gave them the one thing they needed most. A family.
Shasta sniffed and wiped her eyes. “The funny thing was that when I went to Sunday school after I saw the show about the orphanages, everybody in the class had seen the same show. Every single person. They all wanted to do something to help. Choctaws have a big heart for kids. It’s a cultural thing for us—kind of like it takes a village to raise a child, but for us, it takes a tribe.” She laughed softly, and I laughed with her. “If Nana Jo hadn’t kept me involved with the tribe and the church, I think I would have been a seriously messed-up teenager. My dad left when I was eleven. I didn’t take it as well as Jace did, maybe because he was already eighteen and headed off to college, but I’d always been Daddy’s little girl, or at least I thought I was.” Her face held a wounded look that spoke of a pain undimmed by the passage of time.
“It hurts to be left behind.” I felt a sudden sense of kinship. “You just…do the best you can.” It seemed strange for me to be talking about things so close to the core, feelings I’d never discussed with anyone. Yet with Shasta it felt comfortable. We were more similar than I’d realized. “Do you ever hear from your dad?”
She shrugged and began picking at her fingernail polish. “Not much. He left us and started a whole other family. I guess that keeps him occupied.” Dark, silky strands fell across her cheek as she stared at her hands. “I don’t mind it so much for me. I’m a big girl, but I feel bad that Benjamin doesn’t have a grandpa on my side. You’d think my dad would want to know Benji.” Resting her head against the window, she gazed outward, looking like the wounded eleven-year-old whose father had packed his bags and left her behind. I knew that feeling, what it was like to wonder why someone who should have loved you didn’t want to know you at all.
“It’s hard to figure people out sometimes,” I admitted.
“Yeah, it is.” She pointed as we came to a crossroads near Clayton. “Turn here. We’ll go the back way.”
I turned onto a potholed street, part pavement and part gravel, and we wound through a neighborhood of decaying turn-of-the-century houses, then came to an intersection a block off Main. Shasta pointed out the café and we pulled into the parking lot from the back, then sat for a minute, neither of us knowing what to say. I read the pole sign by the road. The bottom half advertised Labor Day weekend specials and Indian tacos, while the top part simply read CAFÉ in peeling red paint and flickering pink neon.
“C’mon, wet’s go, Aunt Maemae,” Benjamin broke the silence. He pretended to dial the phone, then pressed it to his ear, upside down. “He-wow, Aunt Maemae? We come bwek-fast.” Pausing, he rolled his eyes
upward, as if he were listening to someone on the other end, then nodded and answered, “’Kay…’Kay…I waff-wles ’n Twinkie ’n Pop-Tawt. ’Kay?”
Shasta giggled and checked the parking lot. “Looks like we’re here first. We might as well go on in and get a table.”
“Okay.” My fingers hesitated on the keys, which were still in the ignition. “Are you sure I’m not horning in on your family breakfast? I’ve got some things I need to do this morning—go to the bank, pick up some supplies at a grocery store, maybe see if I can get lucky and find a hotel room for tonight. I could just drop you and Benjamin here and go on.”
Shasta stopped halfway out the door. “Are you kidding? You got rid of the people in the motor home. You’re our hero. You’ll probably have to tell the skunk story two or three more times at breakfast.” She pushed to her feet and opened the back door, then leaned through to unbuckle Benji, who was still talking on the phone, this time to “Anta Clause.” “Besides, you’re family. If you do all the genealogy, you’ll probably find us crisscrossed somewhere way back. Less than ten thousand Choctaw people actually made it here on the Trail of Tears, and they all married each other way back when, so there you go. We’re all family somehow or other. You’ll see more about that at the museum, if you take the tour. Choctaw history’s pretty interesting, if you’re into that kind of thing.” Her bland expression added, Which I’m not. “Nana Jo makes a big deal about having all the kids go to classes and stuff. Jace took to it, I guess, and that’s why he teaches history. He’s into all the tribal stuff. Nana Jo’s got it in mind he ought to run for chief one of these days.”
“Wow,” I said, following her and Benjamin around the side of the café to what looked like a back door. “I didn’t know there were chiefs anymore. I mean, one time when I was in school, I got on the Choctaw Web site and saw something about a chief and tribal council representatives, but I thought that was historical stuff.”
Shasta blinked at me in a way that said, Where have you been? “Oh, no. The Choctaw Nation has elections and campaigns, and all the political rigmarole that goes along with that. I don’t know why Jace would want to get involved in it, but I guess he does. That’s his deal.” Opening the kitchen door and stepping into the dim interior, she called out, “Hey, Aunt Maemae. We’re all coming in for breakfast. Where do you want us to sit?”
“Take the back room, and move the chain from the doorway in there. Front’s crowded. Lots of tourists in town today.” A woman emerged from the freezer lugging a box of breakfast sausage under her heavy, overhanging breasts. She was wearing a cotton dress adorned with brightly colored fabric ruffles and line after line of carefully applied strip quilting. She looked like a dancer at a Mexican Hat Dance, her long hair in a ponytail swinging back and forth in a beaded holder. “Uncle Bart called and said y’all had a skunk in camp. Typical Reid reunion.” She paused to look at me, the sausage still in her hands.
Shasta quickly made the introductions. “This is Dell…Sommerfield…but I guess it’s really Clay.” She glanced my way, her brows knotted in the center. “Right?”
Before I could answer, Benjamin launched himself at Aunt Maemae, wrapping his arms around her leg with a roar and a gorilla grip. “Aunt Maemae! I got phone!” Wiggling loose, he held up the phone, then pulled it away when his aunt tried to examine it. “Mine mine mine.”
Tweaking him on the nose, Aunt Maemae shook her head. “Well, don’t call China.”
“I not,” he chirped, turning loose and looking speculatively toward the stove. “Me got pancakes?”
Maemae extended an arm protectively between him and the cooking area. “Hot,” she warned, then turned back to us. “Clay…Clay…so are you Lawton’s girl, or Bonita’s?”
The bell rang at the front window, and a teenaged waitress stuck two tickets on the rack, calling, “Order up.”
“Excuse me,” Maemae said and hurried off.
“You have to pardon us. We’re a little ADD around here but, see, there are lots of Clays in our family. I asked Nana Jo if she knew about anybody who had a daughter about my age that moved away to someplace else. She couldn’t think of anything like that or anybody with your dad’s name, but there’s lots of relatives scattered around we don’t ever see, so we could still be cousins. It’ll help more if you can find out who your dad’s parents were and stuff. Nana Jo might know some of those names.” She captured Benjamin and guided me through a side door into a small dining room. “Just sit anywhere,” she said, then went to take down the chain that had barred customers from entering through the rear of the building. I sat at a table in the back, and Benjamin crawled into the chair across from me, then smiled upward, resting his chin on the tabletop.
“Want a booster seat?” I asked.
“Yup.” He grinned, and I got a booster seat from the corner. He stood up so I could slide it underneath him. Shasta finished setting the tables with silverware rolled in white paper napkins as Jace came in with his kids.
“Hey, Jace, come sit with us.” Shasta nodded toward our table. “That way the table will be full and Mama can’t park here and chew on me because Cody bailed again.”
Jace surveyed the empty room as Willie and Autumn scrambled into the chairs beside me, leaving empty the space next to Benjamin and across from me. “Where’s Cody?”
“Fishing. Again.” Shasta growled under her breath as she squeezed into a chair between Benjamin and the wall.
Smiling sympathetically, Jace slid into the empty seat. “Don’t be too hard on him, kiddo. It’s a guy thing. He’s a guy.”
“I know,” Shasta grumbled. “That’s what I hate about him.”
CHAPTER 12
As the room filled with members of the Reid family, Shasta moved to the end of our table and entertained the kids by drawing cartoon characters on the backs of the paper place mats. Within minutes, several children were gathered around, watching Shasta dash off drawings like a Disney animator and hand them out to her fans. She was amazingly good, creating her pictures with quick, confident strokes, and had a perfect eye for perspective and detail.
Eventually, the kids began challenging her to draw everything from Bugs Bunny to the Statue of Liberty. Autumn stretched across the tabletop in front of me, trying to see, and finally I traded places with her. The switch left Jace and me on the end beside a wall decorated with a long mural of a river running through a pine forest. The colors were slightly dulled by a film of grease and dust from the air-conditioning vent, but it was a beautiful scene, and very well done.
“Shasta painted it when she was sixteen,” Jace offered without glancing up from his menu. “Art runs in our family, and Shasta got the gene. Unfortunately, it skips some of us.”
“I take it you’re not an artist,” I said, and he answered with a rueful twist of his lips.
“Just a history teacher.” He went back to looking at the menu.
“Without teachers, there wouldn’t be any artists,” I pointed out, and he laughed, a wide, white smile spreading across his face and making his eyes sparkle. He had nice eyes, the warm color of coffee, framed with thick lashes. Willie looked like him. I supposed that Autumn looked like her mother.
“You should go into politics,” he joked, and a puff of laughter flew past my lips.
Shasta glanced at us from the end of the table, then went back to drawing.
“I’d be terrible at politics. I hate getting up in front of people.” I couldn’t count the number of times I’d rushed to the bathroom before a performance to throw up. In the moments before the opening, I waited with my heart pounding in my chest like a bird frantically trying to escape a cage. Air solidified in my throat, and my skin went cold and damp. It was only after the music began that I could breathe again.
“Really?” Jace appeared genuinely surprised. “Last night, you seemed pretty much at home in front of an audience.”
Shuddering, I took a sip of my Coke. “Oh, gosh, no. I haven’t done anything like that in a while.”
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p; “I can’t imagine why not.” Our gazes tangled and held, and for an instant I wanted to tell him how music carried me so far inside myself there was no place for fear, and how lately that wasn’t happening anymore, and I was worried. I wanted to admit that I felt like a woman in mourning, because something I loved was lost, and I couldn’t find it.
The intensity of his gaze stirred something that pushed away those thoughts. I couldn’t quantify the feeling, couldn’t label it and tuck it neatly into the file cabinet of past reference points, but it was a powerful sensation. My stomach tightened, and I heard my heart beating slow and soft in my ears, felt my fingers rise to touch the pulse in my neck.
Breaking the link between us, he leaned back in his chair and focused on his menu. He seemed nervous, slightly embarrassed and surprised, as if he’d stepped over some invisible line he hadn’t meant to cross.
Nearby, Nana Jo pushed open the kitchen door, leaned in, and hollered for Maemae to bring some big platters of pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sausage so we could have breakfast family-style. “It’ll be easier that way,” she said, then announced to the whole room that she intended to pay the bill and no one was to argue with her about it. I touched my purse with a mixture of guilt and relief. Nana Jo shouldn’t have been buying my breakfast, but right now I had less than twenty dollars to my name. As soon as we were done here, I needed to find the nearest branch of First Federal Bank so I could get some cash.
“Guess that settles that.” Jace shrugged and dropped his menu into the stack behind the stainless steel napkin holder.
“Guess so,” I agreed, and we fell into an awkward silence. Jace cocked an ear toward a table on the far side of the room, where a short, heavyset man the others called Uncle A.T. was halfway out of his chair, reenacting the story of Uncle Rube and the skunk. From my vantage point, I could both hear and see the story.
“Now you gotta picture this,” A.T. said, cupping his hands in front of his chest like he was carrying a couple of two-liter soda bottles. “The robe thing is hangin’ wide open, and she don’t even realize it, and ole Rube’s just standin’ there, face-to-face with it. He don’t know whether to cover ’em up or just pretend like he can’t see ’em. They’re just hangin’ there like two dried-up pumpkins in a silk toe sack….”