by Gwen Florio
The window slid down. “Lola.” Charlie’s voice shook.
Her own went steady in response. She lowered her window and repeated her mantra of moments before. “Charlie. It’s okay. We’re fine. We’re all fine.”
“All of you?”
“Yes.”
“You—”
“Yes.”
“Bub—”
“Yes.”
“And?” The single word turned two-syllable as it escaped on a fearful sigh.
Lola thought her smile would crack her face. “You do know!”
Charlie’s head fell forward onto the steering wheel, his voice muffled as he spoke into his heavy coat. “Only just now. I dropped off a load of firewood for Alice. Sometimes the propane truck is late getting out to her place. In weather like this, I wanted to make sure she had backup. She congratulated me.” He raised his head.
Lola could just imagine it, the sly smile, the delicious telling, the savoring of being first with the news. Alice might be old, but she was far from saintly, taking mischievous enjoyment in besting those decades her junior.
“How’d you find me?”
“I ran into Jan on my way out to Alice’s. She said you were going to Missoula for the day. Somehow I had a feeling you’d take the bad road. Wish I’d been wrong. But I’m glad I found you. What’s taking you there on a day like this? Couldn’t you wait for spring?”
Lola didn’t have to tell him the truth. There were all kinds of perfectly good reasons to visit Missoula—to shop in an actual department store, catch an art film, eat in a tablecloth restaurant, drink an expertly shaken martini—and every last one of them justified the three-hundred-mile round-trip, especially in the stir-crazy days of winter. But she didn’t have a chance to fashion a lie. He figured it out before she opened her mouth.
“The clinic. It’s in Missoula. You were going to the clinic.”
The movies, the restaurants! Lola tried to form her protest. Charlie held up his hand. “It’s time for us to be straight with each other.”
Lola thought that if she were honest with herself, let alone Charlie, it was long past time. “You didn’t say anything when I stopped by. You didn’t try to stop me from leaving. So I thought—”
“I didn’t try to stop you because I don’t play games. And I didn’t know about the—” A reluctant delicacy kept him from saying the word.
Lola supplied it. Finally. “The baby.”
“If you’re calling it a baby, you’re not going to Missoula.” He waited for her to confirm it.
Wind gusted through the lodgepole pines, carrying snow from branches to ground, flakes sparkling as they sifted downward. A creek ran beside the road, its waters inky against the snow, hurrying over the rocks too fast to freeze. Beside it, an elk raised its head and calmly studied the truck and cruiser. A bit of black moss, dubbed witches’ hair by the locals, fluttered from its many-branched antlers.
“No,” Lola said. “Probably not.”
“Why is there any probably to this?”
“Some guy—it had to be Dawg—beat me up in Burnt Creek. Kicked me in the stomach, among other places. And Charlotte injected me with some sort of drug. The baby might not be okay.”
“That’s what doctors are for. And these are decisions we’ll make together. Because that’s what families do.”
Bub crawled across the seat into Lola’s lap and stuck his head out the window. His tail brushed her face, back and forth.
“See?” said Charlie. “Bub knows I’m talking sense.”
“Then we should go home,” said Lola. Thrilling to the final word of the sentence. “All my boxes are still in the back of the truck.”
“Figures,” said Charlie. “This time we’ll unpack them. All of them. Speaking of the truck, how is it?”
Lola pressed her toe to the accelerator. The engine purred.
“Sounds good,” Charlie said. “I’ll follow you back, just in case.”
Lola gave the truck some more gas and turned the wheel. The truck moved sedately back into its lane. The cruiser moved behind her, albeit at a respectful distance. Charlie, looking out for his family. She wondered if they would marry. Then thought of Thor and Charlotte, of the sort of grotesquerie that marriage could become. That cloud-across-the-sky feeling came over her. But the sun still hung incandescent overhead, teasing its promise of springtime warmth. The roiling black clouds were within.
Glittering icy peaks etched their profiles against the hard blue sky like diamonds cutting glass. The mountains had nourished Charlie’s people in the old days, provided the fat elk and mule deer that fed them through cruel winters, bestowed the snowmelt that replenished the rivers and creeks, and housed sacred spirits whose significance Lola didn’t fully understand, even as she halfway accepted their existence. Her hand crept again to her belly.
“See those mountains? And beyond them, too—north of here, there’s a tall flat one that stands all by itself. That’s Chief Mountain, Ninahstako, the most sacred of all. Sinopah’s over there with the others. Some people say she’s the prettiest. She stands over Two Medicine Lake. And when you get big enough, I’ll take you to Pitamakan Falls. Pitamakan means Running Eagle. She was a warrior woman. Fierce and good. You’ll need to be like her if you’re a girl. And somehow I think you are. You’re going to learn all about Pitamakan and Sinopah and everyone else, especially your own people, the Niitsitapi. I think that’s how you say it. I don’t know where your dad is going to fit into this equation yet, but you’ll have him, along with lots of aunties and cousins and elders to show you the way. You—you and I—we’ve got more family than we’re going to know what to do with. You’re going to be just fine.
“And you know what? As long as you’re fine, I’m going to be fine, too.”