J Jance - Queen of the Night

“A studio?” Lani repeated. “And a pottery wheel? Why would you want one of those?”

“Why do you think?” Mrs. Ladd said impatiently. “To make pots.”

Gabe knew lots of old women who made pots. Well, maybe not lots, but several. That’s what the Tohono O’odham said women were supposed to do when they got too old to do anything else-they were supposed to make pots. It seemed to him that Mrs. Ladd, with her white hair and pale skin, was already that old. As a result, Gabe didn’t find the possibility of her making pots nearly as odd as her daughter did.

“Are you kidding?” Lani asked. “You’ve never done that before. Ever. Why would you start making pots now?”

“Yes, I did make pots once,” Mrs. Ladd replied. “Back in Joseph. There were lots of artists there. Some of them even came to the high school and taught classes.”

Gabe had no idea where Joseph was. It sounded far away. Maybe it was up by Phoenix.

“Does Dad know about this?” Lani asked with a frown.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ladd said. “I told him.”

As the two women in the front seat fell silent, Gabe found himself drifting. He wondered if it was hard for Lani to be an Indian with Milgahn parents. It seemed to him that it made sense to have two parents that were the same kind-from the same tribe.

As they headed north on Silver Bell toward Ina, the steady movement of the car and the accompanying silence got to be too much for him. Gabe’s eyes fell shut, his chin dropped to his chest, and he fell asleep.

In his dream the man was there again, just as he had been earlier, sitting beside Mrs. Ladd’s bright blue swimming pool. Only this time, something was different. Gabe wasn’t alone on the patio. Lani Dahd was there with him.

And then the man spoke. “Why, I’ll be,” he said, turning his empty eyes away from the sun and toward the spot on the patio where Gabe and Lani stood side by side. “If it isn’t Lani! Come over here and have a seat. I was hoping you’d drop by.”

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 5:00 p.m.

94º Fahrenheit

Delphina Escalante Enos stood in line at Basha’s while Rosemary Sixkiller ran the cartload of groceries through the register. Delphina’s four-year-old daughter, Angelina, sat in the child seat of the cart clutching an open box of animal crackers. She munched them carefully, always biting off the heads first.

“You sure look happy,” Rosemary observed.

Rosemary and Delphina had been school classmates, first at Indian Oasis Elementary and later at Baboquivari High School. Rosemary had graduated. Delphina had not. Pregnant at age fifteen, she had dropped out of school to have the baby. Then, when Angie was only two months old, Joaquin Enos, the baby’s father, had run off to take up with someone else. For the better part of three years, Delphina and the baby had stayed on with Delphina’s parents in Nolic, but her father was ill now-with diabetes-and having a busy baby underfoot was too hard on everyone.

Realizing she had to do better for her child, Delphina had earned her GED and had managed to get a job doing filing for the tribe. It was at work where she had met Donald Rios, a man who hailed from Komelik Village and who was also on the tribal council. His family had land and cattle.

By reservation standards, the Rios family was well-to-do. Their family compound consisted of four mobile homes set around a central courtyard-a concrete central courtyard. They also had their own well-one that was deep enough to work even in the dead of summer. That was unusual, too. Most of the time a well would belong to an entire village rather than to a single family. But it wasn’t just Donald’s comfortable circumstances that made him so appealing to Delphina.

Donald was everything that Joaquin Enos had never been. Donald was kind and caring. He had a job that he went to every day. He was responsible, and he loved Delphina and her baby to distraction. He never came to see Delphina without bringing something for Angie-a toy or a book or a packet of stickers.

He was someone Delphina was comfortable with. That made far more sense to her than the fact that his family might have money. All his relatives-parents, brothers, and sisters-were reputable, churchgoing people-Presbyterians. As far as Delphina’s own family was concerned, there were plenty of skeletons in those closets-people who had done bad and who were no longer mentioned at family gatherings.

But the other thing the Rios family had going for them was a strong connection to the old ways. Maybe it was just because they lived so close to I’itoi’s home on Baboquivari that they held to many of the old traditions. Delphina loved hearing Donald talk about his beloved old grandmother and how she had told him stories-the traditional I’itoi stories-when he was a little kid. Delphina liked to think that some time when it wasn’t summer, he would tell those same stories to Angie, so she would know them, too.

Right then, though, standing in the checkout line in Basha’s, Delphina beamed at Rosemary’s comment. The clerk’s assessment was true. Delphina Escalante Enos was happy-really happy-for the first time in her whole life.

“Donald is taking us to the dance at Vamori tonight,” she admitted shyly, ducking her head as she spoke. “Both of us,” she added, nodding in Angie’s direction. “He was hinting around that there’s something he wants to show us before we go to the dance.”

“It’s a full moon,” Rosemary said. “Maybe he’ll give you a ring.”

Delphina nodded, but she didn’t say anything aloud. An engagement ring was just what she wanted.

When Donald had stopped by her office on Friday afternoon, he had been teasing Delphina, trying to make her blush. He had told the other girls in the office, the ones Delphina worked with, that he had something special he wanted to show her on their way to the dance. After he left the office the girls had been talking, and they all seemed to think the same thing. Since Donald and Delphina had been going out for a couple of months, it made sense that it would be time for him to give her a ring.

“He’s a nice guy,” Rosemary said. “He comes in here a lot to buy food from the deli. I don’t think he’s a very good cook.”

“I can cook,” Delphina declared. “If we got married, he could buy the groceries and I would cook.”

“Sounds like a good deal to me,” Rosemary said.

They were quiet for a few moments while Rosemary packed Delphina’s groceries into her cloth bags and then loaded them back into the shopping cart. By then Angelina was done with her box of animal crackers and wanted another one.

“No,” Delphina said, shushing her whiny four-year-old. Then she turned back to Rosemary. “Are you coming to the dance, too?” Delphina asked when that job was finished.

The feast and dance at Vamori were always good ones, the best ones of the summer, people said, with plenty of food at the feast house and with a band playing chicken-scratch music from sunset to sunrise.

“I guess,” Rosemary said. “At nine. After I get off work, if I’m not too tired.”

Delphina took her groceries out to the parking lot and loaded them into the back of a battered old Dodge Ram pickup. Then she strapped Angie into her booster seat.

The truck wasn’t much, but she was grateful to have it. Before Leo Ortiz, over at the gas station, sold it to her, she and Angie had been forced to walk back and forth to work and to the grocery store from their decrepit mobile home on the road to Big Fields. Walking there wasn’t bad in the morning when it was cool, but after a long day at work, coming home in the afternoon heat had been hard, especially when Delphina had groceries to carry or when Angie was too tired to walk. Sometimes other people would give them rides, but most of the time they walked.