Dakota Read Free Page A

accustomed to the crush of relatives at each and every occasion of note. At least as far as she could tell, everyone was related in some way to everyone else; it seemed as though the entire reservation turned out for each graduation, each military sendoff and each funeral.
    “It’s a pain,” Charlie had told her once, the affection in his tone belying the words. “As a kid, I could never get away with anything. Aunties everywhere. They’d feed you, sure, but they had their eye on you all the time.”
    Lola, an only child of only-children parents, couldn’t fathom such a total-immersion experience of family life. Would it feel protected, cocoon-like? Or smothering? “A little of both,” Charlie had allowed. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and stood on her toes and searched the crowd for Joshua.
    “Over there.” Josephine deRoche pointed with pursed lips. Lola knew Josephine from covering tribal council meetings. As treasurer, Josephine managed the budget as meticulously as she did her own appearance. But the twin assaults of heat and grief were too much for her, causing her normally shellacked beehive to list to one side. Mascara pooled atop plump cheeks.
    People clustered around a pair of easy chairs in the corner of the room where Joshua, who appeared to be the only man in a roomful of women, sat beside Alice Kicking Woman. He clutched a framed graduation photo of himself and Judith, star quilts draping their shoulders, waist-length hair flowing free beneath their mortarboards. Lola put a hand to her head, self-conscious as always on the reservation about her thin, kinked curls. Every head around her was topped with hair so strong and shiny and straight that it could have been featured in a shampoo commercial. Every head except Joshua’s, that is. His own hair, freshly shorn, stood up in clumps. Alice’s twisted frame curled toward him like a question mark. Deep grooves seamed her face, disappearing into the hollows of her cheeks, reemerging as vertical stitching around her mouth.
    Lola hesitated. Etiquette mandated that attention be paid first to an elder. But what happened when someone died? Would the bereaved then take precedence? She looked around for Alice’s great-granddaughter, Tina, a high school senior who’d recently declared herself a reporter in training. Lola allowed Tina to follow her around on stories and in return, Tina helped Lola navigate the swirling complexities of tribal custom. Lacking Tina’s guidance, Lola finally knelt between the chairs and took Alice’s hand in one of her own and Joshua’s in the other. “I’m so sorry about Ju—” A foot nudged her shin. She glanced up. Tina’s familiar ponytail switched back and forth as she shook her head at Lola.
    “No names now,” Tina mouthed.
    “—your sister,” Lola finished.
    Joshua gave no sign of having heard. Lola stood to make room for the next person, and followed Tina’s bobbing ponytail into the kitchen, where a fry bread assembly line was in progress. “What happened to his hair?” she whispered as they moved to join it.
    “He cut it as soon as he heard,” Tina said. “It’s a traditional sign of mourning. Give me your hands.”
    Tina dusted Lola’s palms with flour and then slapped a ball of dough into her hands. Lola began rolling and shaping it, her movements awkward compared to the swift, sure work of the others, and waited for the feeling of strangeness she always felt, as the lone white person in the room, to subside.
    “It’s so sad,” someone said. “First their parents and then their gran’mother. Those two practically raised themselves after she died.”
    Lola looked to see who’d spoken and put a finger through her disc of dough. It was Josephine’s married granddaughter, Angela Kills At Night. Lola rolled the dough back into a ball and started over. “When was that?”
    “Maybe five, six years. The twins were just starting high school,” Angela said. “They were a couple of years