Dakota Read Free Page B

behind me.” She used a fork to flip a piece of fry bread from the pan and onto a stack of paper towels, which darkened instantly beneath it. She dropped her own circle of dough, paper-thin and sized perfectly to the pan, into the smoking lard. It puffed high and golden. “And half their relatives who are left, the men anyway, are working over in the oil patch. It’s going to be a problem getting them here for this.”
    “Because of the weather?” Lola asked.
    “Because they just started their three weeks.”
    Lola nodded, catching the reference to the fact that people commuted to jobs in western North Dakota’s Bakken oil field in multiple-week shifts.
    “I don’t imagine those bosses let anything, even a funeral, mess with their production schedules,” Angela said. “Bad enough we lose our men for weeks on end. Now they’ll have to worry about losing their jobs if they want to do the right thing.”
    Even Lola felt the way the air leaked out of the room. Especially in winter, when the seasonal jobs catering to tourists on their way to Glacier dried up, unemployment on the reservation often soared toward 70, 80 percent. Still, funerals took precedence over jobs. Everybody—all the local employers, at least—knew that. But would bosses nearly five hundred miles away understand?
    Josephine brought the subject back to Judith. “I hear she almost made it home,” she said. Lola knew Josephine was past sixty, yet her skin remained unlined and her hair gleamed like obsidian. Lola, only in her mid-thirties, was acutely aware of the silver already threading her own tangled chestnut curls, the insistent etchings at the corners of her grey eyes. Josephine sat rounds of bread on a tray, beside a stack of the inevitable sandwiches of bologna and cheese on white bread. She wiped her hand on a dishtowel and dipped it into a plastic bag of powdered sugar. She sifted the sugar over the fry bread, toweled her hand again, lifted the tray and swung a hip against the kitchen door. The women waited until it closed behind her. “At least we know where Joshua’s sister is now,” Angela said. “Not like those other ones who ran away.”
    Beside Lola, Tina stiffened. But in a group of older women, it wasn’t Tina’s place to talk. Lola swiped her sleeve across her forehead again. “What other ones?” Sometimes there was an advantage being shaky on etiquette.
    Angela counted on floury fingers. “Let’s see. There was Maylinn Kiyo. She was the first. Carole Bear Shoe and Annie Lenoir, they ran away, too.”
    Jeannette Finley Heavy Runner dumped more flour into a bowl, added baking powder and salt, and rubbed in lard with her fingers. She was Salish, from the other side of the Continental Divide, but had married a Blackfeet man thirty years earlier and long since mastered the labyrinth of kinship and gossip. “And Nancy deRoche. Josephine’s husband’s nephew’s daughter. Josephine raised her.” The women looked toward the door.
    “I don’t know any of them,” Lola said.
    “They left last year. A few months after Judith, but before you got here. For a while there, it seemed like every time you turned around, another girl ran off.”
    “My sister didn’t run away.” Joshua stood in the doorway. The fat in the skillet hissed and popped, tiny explosions in the sudden silence.
    “Nobody ever heard from her,” Angela said finally.
    “That’s how I know she didn’t run away. She never would have just up and disappeared on me. She was doing so well. Those other ones, they were—” He looked around the room at the women, and dropped his voice—“using.”
    Lola thought of the tracks on Judith’s forearms, the angry brand. “I know that—” she caught herself just as her lips began to shape the name “that your sister had her struggles.”
    Joshua’s eyes were veined red, his voice raw. “And she beat them. That time in rehab last year, that did the trick. We got her into a program that uses traditional