“Where Auntie Em?” Emilio says, running to the window to look for Emmy. Audrey and I were about to make fry bread before Lena brought up Reuben’s missing heart.
“You don’t have an auntie Em,” Grace says to Emilio. “You never did.”
“You’re mean,” Lena says.
Grace replies in Salish—she’s been listening to the language tapes the elders made—but Lena doesn’t understand. “Need an interpreter?” Grace asks.
“Stop it, girls,” I say. “Both of you.” I tell them to take Emilio outside and build a snowman with him. If Emilio went to preschool on the rez, he’d already know how to look for animal tracks in the snow.
Grace likes Emmy or she wouldn’t still treasure that set of little Asian bowls Emmy gave to her. At first, much to my annoyance, Grace tried to eat all her meals out of them. Even spaghetti. Now she keeps sacred beads in the bowls. When I performed that ceremony on Emmy after Beth died, my oldest aunt, who is also my oldest living relative, insisted Emmy was Reuben’s wife. When I tried to explain otherwise, she scolded me for shortsightedness.
Reuben doesn’t write Emmy back. Not a single letter. He simply says, “I can’t,” when I ask him why not. He keeps the letters in a canvas bag in his truck. The kids got into them once. There was also a book in the bag called Sister Carrie, which Emmy obviously left here, and a bunch of tiny origami frogs and foxes and other animals that Emmy must tuck into her letters. I wanted to snoop but didn’t.
Reuben and I have a heart-to-heart at the end of January. I’m up north with my kids for the winter dances. My brother and I are alone for a few hours—my arrangement—at Mom’s Omak apartment. We sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.
“Mom tells me you’ve been hanging out with Jenny Larsen,” I say. Jenny’s dad is the worst kind of drunken rodeo asshole. And yes, there is more than one kind. I went to school with other Larsen kids: brothers, cousins, whatever. Basically all trash. Except Jenny. She’s one of those rare, genuinely sweet church girls who don’t give blow jobs to football players behind the bleachers. She sings on Omak street corners with her youth group.
“Yeah, so what?” Reuben says. He wears his senior sweatshirt with OMAK PIONEERS on the front and the names of all his classmates on the back. “Jenny and I have a lot of classes together this year. We’re just friends.”
“And she knows that?”
“She knows we’re friends.”
“Just friends?”
There’s a stack of bills on the kitchen table, as always. Reuben starts looking through them. “I’ve done nothing for her to think otherwise.”
“You spend time with her.”
“I spend time with all my friends.”
“Not according to Mom.”
“Since when do you take Mom’s word over mine?” Good point. “Look,” he says, trying to change the subject, “Mom hasn’t paid the cable bill in two months. I gave her money.”
“Does Jenny know about Emmy?”
The name hits him like a punch in the gut. I shouldn’t have said it. I know better, as an Indian. He can’t speak. He pushes the bills away, then he pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt as if to shield himself.
I get up and freshen our coffee.
“Jenny saw Emmy and me together this summer,” he says when I sit back down. “Outside Mom’s work. Emmy liked Jenny’s voice.”
I look hard at him. “Are you trying to save Jenny like you saved—”
“Stop right there, Teresa. Fuck.” He’s wound tight. “Jenny is my friend. Do I want to help her get away from her bastard of a dad? Hell, yes. I don’t love her, though.” He laughs. “Not even close.”
“Does she know that?”
“I helped her fill out her college applications—for fucking Christian colleges in western Washington. We’ve never made out. I’ve never taken her on the rez.”
“She reminds you of Emmy, though.”
“No.” He laughs sarcastically again. I haven’t heard Reuben laugh for real since last summer.
“Not even a little?”
“Emmy Nolan is more alive than Jenny Larsen will ever be. If Jenny is like anyone, it’s Beth Miller.” Now he’s the one not being a good Indian, blurting the name of the dead like that. “So maybe, sis, I should be asking you about her.”
“What the heck does that mean?” I wish I had a sweatshirt hood to pull up. “Matt Miller is your buddy.”
“So, you do know what I mean.”
“He shovels snow for me, fixed my van. Being a kind neighbor.”
“Mr. Miller mowed your lawn so many times this past fall that there’s no line anymore between yours and his.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Reuben. Only you would notice that.” I reach over and pull down his sweatshirt hood so I can see his whole face.
He’s smiling. I am jolted by how much I miss his smile.
“I feel calm when I’m with Jenny,” he admits. “A little calm. Especially after I read a batch of letters from Emmy.”
“Do you wish she wouldn’t write?”
“At first, I did. I told her not to write, that I wouldn’t write back. I thought it would be easier, you know. But I live for those letters, Teresa. I get what she’s doing. It’s been almost six months since I’ve seen her.”
“What is she doing?”
He can’t answer for a moment. Shit. I didn’t mean to make him cry. “She’s not letting me go.” He stands up. “But she will.” He grabs his truck keys off the hook on the kitchen wall. “She’ll get sick of my silence.”
* * *
When snow leaves the mountains, the elders say, it’s time to start anew. I pray for my brother. For his renewal. I dance. I even talk to the chaplain at the hospital in Moses Lake where I work. I’ve talked to him before when my guilt for not living on the rez overwhelms me. We’ve prayed together for my people. We pray now for Reuben. We pray for Emmy, and for Matt.
* * *
Matt comes to Reuben’s high school graduation. Class of 1999. My little brother won a full scholarship to Washington State University in Pullman. Matt beams almost more than I do. It’s been a bloody four years at American high schools. Reuben’s lucky to be alive. There’s a party the next day for Reuben and Ray at a park in Omak. There’s salmon and elk, cake, fry bread, macaroni salad, egg rolls, and rice. There’s drumming. Jenny stops by for a short time. She also won a scholarship to a Christian college in Tacoma. Reuben took her to the prom. She and Reuben don’t touch at the picnic, and probably not at the prom either, other than to dance. But I can tell Jenny wishes more than anything that Reuben would touch her. She steps closer whenever he inches away. But so do a couple of pretty Nez Perce girls visiting here from Lapwai, which is probably why Jenny leaves early. All my aunts keep eyeballing Matt and me, though I’ve never said a word, and maybe that’s why. Mom mentions how well Matt seems to know my kids. Except Grace, I think, who keeps her distance. As far as I know, Matt has never talked to Reuben about Emmy since she left. I assumed it was an unspoken rule between them. Matt occasionally asks me about Reuben and Emmy—if Reuben writes her back and that sort of thing. But I don’t think he puts any pressure on Reuben. So I’m surprised at the graduation party when I hear Matt mention to Reuben that he’s flying to California the following week for Emmy’s graduation and that he’d like to buy Reuben a ticket. My brother disappears. For the rest of the party. For weeks.
When Matt gets back from California, he and I start sitting outside together, between our trailers, careful to keep our backs to Beth’s empty garden beds. He got rid of Beth’s car awhile ago and brought his boat from his parents’ house to park in its place. He takes up smoking, and we share “cigarette breaks” together. He takes breaks from the loneliness of his trailer, which is still silent despite his buying a TV and a stereo and getting his old record collection from the basement of his parents’ house. And I tak
e breaks from my kids. We talk about our jobs mostly and my kids, but also our childhoods. Two weekends in a row Matt barbecues hamburgers and hot dogs for the kids and I make mac and cheese and Jell-O, and we eat outside at the table Reuben and Emmy bought. He tells me he quit attending church for good, any church, although he’s quick to add that he still believes in God and, for Beth’s sake, probably always will. I respect that. The only plants of Beth’s still alive are the lavender bushes she planted in the strip between our driveways. They continue to thrive with my pruning and watering.
Reuben remains a no-show, and Matt is beside himself for offering that ticket.
“I didn’t mean to drive him away, Teresa.”
“You didn’t. I told you. It’s just Reuben.” It’s just Indian men.
Finally Matt admits that Emmy put him up to it. “She thought, or hoped, all school year that she’d be back here this summer. She told me she kept asking your brother in her letters if he even wanted her to come, but he never replied. She pleaded with me to bring Reuben to California.”
Matt’s love for Emmy is heartwarming, and heartbreaking. On the rez, love between nieces and nephews and their aunts and uncles is more apparent, or at least more a part of daily life, than off the rez.
“Emmy’s going to have a baby brother or sister. Her mom is big and pregnant—and glowing.” He takes a long puff of his cigarette and looks off for a few. Beth was never given the chance to glow like that. I have four times. He keeps looking off until I pull him back with a question.
“Is Emmy excited about the baby?” I ask.
“Yes, she is.” He looks at me and smiles. I think he’s catching on to the way I’m not letting his thoughts wander too near any edge. “But she’s not excited about Berkeley. She’s sad. Her stepdad worries a lot about her. He told me he worries so much about Emmy that he’s having a hard time getting revved about the new baby. I worry too. There’s a similar broken look in Emmy’s and Reuben’s eyes.”
And a shattered look in Matt’s. Only he doesn’t realize. I put my hand on top of his, just for a second, or so I had intended, but it feels right. So I leave it there.
* * *
Reuben doesn’t return the entire summer: not to collect Emmy’s letters, not for the Fourth of July Pow Wow, not for the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race, not for the Indian Encampment. Emmy’s been gone now one full year.
He doesn’t return to attend college in the fall. Brother.
“I did this,” Matt says.
“You didn’t, Matt. If not for you, Reuben would be a mess.”
Matt starts coming over early in the mornings for coffee, except on my days off, when I try to get caught up a bit on sleep, or on mornings when he goes fishing. We scoot our chairs closer as the weather gets colder.
“We don’t know that Reuben isn’t a mess somewhere,” he says. “I can’t believe he missed his scholarship.”
I too am starting to really worry. “Let’s just trust that he’s okay.” I don’t tell Matt, but Reuben isn’t in Washington anymore. No one on either side of the mountains has seen him. My real dad is Puyallup, and I asked his family to check around and keep an eye out.
“Fuck,” Matt says. “I can’t live with this.”
He lets me put my hand on top of his, like friends. Twice he’s put his hand on top of mine. But it has never gone further. I’ve thought about its going further a lot. His wife’s been dead now for almost fifteen months.
“Can you live with this?” I kiss him lightly on the lips.
Surprisingly, he says, “I can.”
He kisses me back. There’s a lot of something in this man. His kiss almost makes me faint. I don’t exaggerate. If he wants, I’ll let him take me to bed right now before the kids wake up. I simply wouldn’t be able to refuse. I am a sucker for a good kisser. If a man knows how to kiss—and sadly, more don’t than do—I’ll excuse his not-so-good looks or his not-so-steady job. Matt’s nice-looking. I usually prefer Indian men, hands down, but Matt has a job, and he isn’t torn between having a job and living on the rez. He kisses me once more, but longer. Oh, Jesus. Then he leaves.
I don’t see him for a couple days afterward. No morning coffee. No evening cigarette breaks. I meet him at his truck on Saturday. He left early to go salmon fishing on a stretch of the Columbia that whites dubbed the Hanford Reach, but that natives have older names for. He went fishing despite it being the coldest morning in six months and despite the fact that the fall chinook are nearly done spawning there. The leaves on the poplars are falling. I sent my kids away after I got a letter in the mail from Reuben. I know Matt will be ecstatic, and I want the moment with just him.
“Teresa,” he says. “How are you?” He’s embarrassed.
“I’m good.”
“How’s Emilio’s ear infection?”
“Emilio’s all better.”
“Did Grace make the team?” he asks.
She tried out for the seventh-grade girls’ basketball team. “She did,” I say proudly.
“Just like Audrey and the fairy kingdom predicted.”
He’s referring to the tarot cards Emmy gave the girls. Grace making the team should help her fit in a bit. She hasn’t quit asking to move back to the rez.
“Land any kings?” I ask him.
“Only two keepers, back trolling, but I released them. The flow was too fast. I kept flying past the fish. That, and my mind kept wandering.” He smiles awkwardly. “About the other morning—”
“Save it,” I say. “Look.” I hand him the letter from Reuben, which also contains three money orders: one for me, one for Mom, and one for Matt to pay back the truck repairs. The letter also gives a post office box for me to forward Emmy’s letters if she’s still writing them, which she is.
“He’s been fishing in Alaska?” Matt says, smiling widely. “I’ll be damned. The kid’s a great fisherman. I swear I’ve never seen anything like it.” He tells me to keep the money order intended for him. I argue. He says he’ll tear it up before he spends the kid’s money. “Oh, this makes my day, Teresa.”
He hugs me. I rub his back. “My kids are gone. Get changed and come over so we can celebrate.”
He does. I give him a beer. He’s so nervous that his hands shake. After we finish our beers, I lead him into my bedroom. I have extra poundage from my four kids. Beth was slim. But I make up for it with my large breasts, or so I’ve been told. I’m worried he might not know what to do with so much breast, but he does. He’s tender. So tender. I don’t remember the last time I was brought to orgasm like that. He cries after we’re through. But that’s to be expected, I suppose, from a recent widower. I give him space.
“I’m sorry,” he says, sitting up.
Does he mean for the sex or for the tears? Reuben told me once that Emmy apologized for everything.
“I led you in here, don’t forget,” I say. “And why apologize? It was nice, Matt. It was fun. It’s okay to have fun.”
“You enjoyed it?”
“Didn’t I make that obvious?”
He smiles. Matt was devastated at first by Beth’s death, but now it seems to be releasing him—not just from grief but from a way of life too restrictive. He must sense this release. How terribly painful.
“Don’t leave yet,” I say when he gets up and starts to dress. “I still have an hour before I have to get the kids.”
“I should leave.”
“Why should you leave? I’m not going to tell anyone.” And I’m not. “No one has to know. It’s no one’s business,” I say. “Not even Reuben’s.”
He takes his shirt back off.
* * *
Emmy doesn’t start that big university in Berkeley until January. Something about deferred admission. During the fall semester—the same fall Reuben was supposed to start WSU and Matt and I began our romance—Emmy lived at home and attended junior college in
Sacramento and continued to send letters here weekly for Reuben. One week she sent three, and my heart went out to her. After she moves to Berkeley, I get no letters for a month. Has she finally given up? Then I get a padded envelope from Emmy with what feels like a journal inside it—like one of those composition notebooks. I get one a month. The girl hasn’t given up. I have to give her credit for that, having, at her age and younger, waited in silence for Indian boys. In fact, she’s stronger than I’ve ever been about love. Reuben calls in April, after three months without my forwarding anything to him. I was hoping that would work.
“If you want the journals,” I say, “come and get them.”
It’s been eleven months since I last saw Reuben at the graduation party. I can’t go a year without seeing my baby brother.
Reuben shows up on my doorstep a week after his phone call. I barely recognize him. His hair is shoulder length, which makes him look like his dad, whom I miss. Reuben’s dad—I called him Dad—used to swear to Reuben and his sidekick Ray that he stole Mom and me in a horse raid. The version he told me when I was young was far more romantic. He said Mom and I were his to begin with, but we were stolen from him. It took him many lifetimes to steal us back, but he did. I believe him. His devotion in that story got me through hard times: the idea that someone could love me that much. He broke Mom’s heart, but he loved her too, very deeply. He loved Reuben the most. Why Dad couldn’t be there for my brother, I never understood. Reuben’s body is that of a man’s now—a man who labors hard for a living. He’s not a boy any longer. “Oh, Reuben.” His hands are rough when I hold them.
“I’ve missed you, sis, and the kids.”
They all hug him for ten minutes or more. He tells them he’s been up north fishing at sea, which the two boys start playing immediately. Reuben says the summer salmon run in Bristol Bay is amazing. He felt high for weeks. And then he followed the fish to more remote places. He’s had success securing work, he says, with recruiters and skippers who think, for some reason, that he’s good luck.
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