by PB Rippey
“What if,” I mutter, my foot pressing the pedal down until the needle grazes eighty-five, “this road is me? Desolate. Rut ridden. Boring.”
“Don’t even go there,” Dani warns from the back seat, twanging the guitar in her lap. “He’s less important than yogurt, Arabella.”
“Yogurt?”
“Shut up and sing the harmony. Here’s my chord. Got it? I need Joni Mitchell. I need the Indigo Girls. I need Dylan. I need every ounce of any Beatle you even suspected you had a crush on—”
“George.”
“Listen!”
Dani plays the guitar and sings and I chime in with harmonies she taught me minutes ago, when she experienced a brain bloat: interruption of rehearsal to insert a fresh musical tweak in a song. Since leaving Los Angeles less than twenty-four hours ago, Dani has experienced a dozen brain bloats, giving me plenty of new material to memorize.
“Works great,” Dani says when we finish, the brain bloat in place. “Do you think,” she asks, trying not to sound worried, but not fooling me, “you’ll remember the new shit for tonight, Arabella?”
“Sure. Let’s just go over the chorus again?”
“Absolutely!"
A bright red ‘sucky-thing’ projectiles into my lap, Dani's baby, bundled in the car seat next to her, blurting out, “Dada!”
“Listen, kid,” Dani growls. “Daddy’s cute, but Daddy can’t pump breastmilk in a pinch. Mama,” she orders the baby, returning the sucky-thing to the heart shaped mouth. “Say Mama.”
The sucky-thing hits the dash to my right.
“Pull over, Arabella,” Dani sighs, fiddling with belts and snaps on the car seat. “I have to get the boob out and I don’t want to drip milk on my guitar.”
Low blue mesa. Hexagonal houses. Stray, emaciated dogs. Stray ponies grazing next to the highway. Dead dogs in the road. No, thank god, dead ponies. Wind pinwheels the leaves of cottonwoods and buffets the station wagon as I ease us deeper into the Navajo reservation, country striped the colors of the sandstone jars and blankets sold roadside.
“Space,” Dani utters this and nothing else for thirty miles, so taken is she with the landscape. When we race into Windowrock, she sighs as if she thought we’d never see a town again—though it’s not much. Metal Conoco sign banging in the wind. Convenience store. More stray dogs one step from the highway. The sun eases behind the mesas, turning them the plum of scars.
“Look,” Dani says tensely above the baby’s screams. I’ve just told her that according to the directions from her friend, we have yet another fifteen miles to travel. “Can’t you get any more juice out of this crap mobile?”
I gun the car through the dimming landscape of arcing rock, scraggly fields and dwellings with no doors, power lines or antennas.
“At least,” I joke over the baby’s screams, “we’re staying next door to a hospital. Should we have an emergency, I mean.”
“Shut up and drive,” Dani growls, meaning it.
It’s a house like all the others on the block: taupe, one story rectangular with aluminum framing around the windows. The boxy front yard is defined by chain link fence. Lumps of petrified wood decorate the cement porch. The cold that shocks me the second I step from the car doesn’t phase the round woman dressed in a shower cap and aqua terrycloth towel trotting down the weed stippled walk.
“I knew you’d come just as I was getting in the bath,” the woman squeals, her huge smile dimpling her cheeks. “Where’s that baby? Lemme at her. Ooo,” she squeals, grabbing the baby from Dani. “Yummy baby. I could eat you up! Yar, yar,” she says, gnawing the baby’s bunting.
I glance at Dani and she says wryly, “Arabella, meet Mary Mother of God.”
“Ooo—I’m gonna lose my towel. Take her,” Mary cries, shoving the baby at me. The baby twists in my arms so that she can keep her eyes on Mary.
“Dada,” the baby gurgles, smitten.
Mary re-knots her towel and embraces the hood of the station wagon. “Where,” she demands, “did you get this beauty, Dani?”
“It’s just your average crap mobile,” Dani says and I am shocked to see her blush for the first time since I’ve known her. “Dad bought it for me,” she mumbles, shifting.
“Ooo,” Mary squeals, a woman in a towel hugging a Taurus. “I hope you realize how lucky you are! Our minivan is stone age.”
Dani rolls her eyes at me, then whines, “Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course, sweetie!” Mary throws herself at Dani and just as quickly releases her. “Come inside and we can chat before the kids wake up. Hurry,” she cries, beckoning urgently as she trots up the walkway, almost losing her towel. Her thick legs are jiggly, white as uncooked chicken. “I want you all to myself!”
Dani pulls the baby from my arms.
“Grab the guitar,” she orders me. “I’ll have to tune before the gig.”
There are small children everywhere. On the walls. On every bookcase. Stuck to the refrigerator. One even sits on my lap, studying me with an artful grin.
“Yoo bootiful,” she tells me, all blonde cottony hair and sly blue eyes and tiny coconut white teeth. She looks just like me when I was three. My inner child has materialized and it’s freaking me out.
“You’re beautiful,” I assure her nervously and she throws her head back in a very adult manner and emits a long, delighted giggle.
“Baybee, laydee,” she says. I have no idea what she means. I glance at Dani for support, but she’s focused on breast feeding. Another towheaded girl, this one roughly eighteen months, tugs at Mary’s towel, jealously watching Dani’s baby feed.
“Tee tee,” the child cries, freeing the towel and snatching at Mary’s soccer ball-ish breasts.
“Oh, okay,” Mary sighs, hauling the child into her lap. She shoves a nipple in the kid’s mouth and shakes her head at us in a what’s a busy mom to do manner. I never knew it was okay for a child old enough to walk to breast feed. I never knew this was—allowed. I stare at the sight with both fascination and horror.
“Baybee, laydee,” the girl on my lap sing-songs, pressing sticky fingers to my lips.
I remove her hand. “Dani—is that bottle of chardonnay around?”
“In the car, babe. Ow! Jesus, Mary! Doesn’t the breast feeding shit drive you nuts?”
I look at Mary. The giant baby sucks and slurps noisily, pawing Mary's breast, thumping her heels into Mary's thighs.
“Truthfully?” Mary says with a wistfulness I’m not sure I totally buy. “I want more.”
“Jesus,” Dani gasps.
“Yes,” Mary insists, squealing, “I miss having a teensy one around!”
“Rachel, I have to—”
“Charge-nay,” Rachel declares, sliding from my lap. She skips to the front door. “Wine walk!”
“You’re taking Rachel for a walk? How sweet,” Mary says, her cheeks as flushed as those of her ravenous baby. “Rachel, put your parka on.”
A parka is on that child before I’ve stood from my chair. She produces mittens, too, and dangles them at me.
“Go, bootiful,” I’m instructed.
I glance at Dani. She’s tucking a breast into her bra, the baby passed out in her arms.
“I’ll be fine,” she tells me in a big whisper, as if I might have been worried. “Pour me a glass of chardonnay when you get back. Bye!”
“It’s getting dark,” I point out, but Mary waves her hand in a dismissive manner.
“You’ve a good ten minutes, Arabella.”
I grab my coat and follow Rachel outside.
As I’m tugged around the neighborhood I’m thinking, what have we done to these people, and, the White Man sucks!, and then I remember: we are in the non-Navajo part of town. These are the houses of doctors, nurses, interns and their families. I am in the reservation within the reservation. Where are the children playing in their yards after school? Where are the parents driving up with groceries and greetings? Where is the daily routine? Not a soul is to be seen but myself, Rachel and a pack of manic dogs gallivanting through the brown yards, peeing on chain link. There is no sound but that of our shoes smushing ocher leaves coating the pavement like a dismal papier mache project.
“Where do your friends live?” I ask Rachel, but she just giggles and yanks me to the perimeter of a sad playground. Sand surrounding a rusty swingset and dented slide is carpeted in colored bottle glass.
“Cutting ground,” Rachel says and I freeze because I know exactly what she means.
I stare hard at the glass, trying not to cry.
“Baybee,” Rachel says softly. “Laydee.”
She squeezes my hand.
It’s pitch black when we reach the front door.
“Charge-nay?” Rachel queries, slipping off her little boots. Her eyes are blue explosions in the porch light and I look right into them.
“No, hon” I say. “I’ll wait.”
She nods in a manner I find ceremonious, pats my knee, and bursts into the house demanding dinner and attention from her daddy. I glance at the darkness beyond the porch light—world incubating under an immobile, raven wing.
I turn quickly and follow Rachel inside.
"Hi!" Mary greets me excitedly, dressed in velvety mauve J Crew. Her brushed hair glows, her cheeks are stained a plush red. I trail her into the hall and watch her primp before a mirror.
“You look fantastic, Mary.”
“Bathing,” she replies, fluffing her locks, “moves mountains.”
I’m beginning a nervous response, realizing I haven’t brought anything resembling J Crew to wear tonight, when Dani bursts from the bathroom in a poof of shower steam, her body wrapped in an aqua towel.
“Get ready, babe,” she shouts. “Now!”
When I emerge from the bathroom twenty minutes later dressed in black jeans, black motorcycle boots and a black turtle neck sweater plunging to my knees, the adults are gulping chardonnay from glasses bulbous enough to host goldfish, and the babysitter (a petite teen and sweetly blonde), receives a lecture from Mary on why she must leave the reservation the second she graduates from high school—if not sooner.
“Legal emancipation,” Mary counsels and the babysitter nods, casing me head to toe. “Or run away from home,” Mary says. “But get out.”
The babysitter asks me, “You from LA, too?”
“Hollywood,” I say and her eyes widen.
“Tell her how super LA is,” Mary orders me with a wink only I can see, mouthing Mother’s a drunk.
“Um—”
“Oh, I’m there,” the babysitter says. She stands to emphasize this statement, a waif in baggy cargo pants and a tank top revealing a pierced navel. “I’m there, man!”
“Good girl,” Mary says, and claps her hands at the adults. “New Mexico, here we come!”
Dani ignores my raised eyebrows.
“New Mexico?” I query as she gulps her remaining chardonnay. When she comes up for air she says, too cheerfully, “The gig is half an hour north, or east, or something. Gallup, New Mexico. Hey, how many states can we pass through in one day? I love it!”
I don’t love the idea of driving for another half an hour, but I’m too nervous about performing to complain.
“Well—can we rehearse on the way there?”
“Absolutely,” Dani says, extending her arms to Mary and the husband as though including them in a big joke. “Absolutely we can rehearse on the way there, Arabella!”
Everyone laughs.
I grab the guitar and head for the crap mobile wondering why I ever commit to anything.
For some reason we’re passing clapboardy houses with yards in miniature and the minivan I've diligently tailgated is slowing down.
“Neighborhood joint?” I ask.
“Mary said ‘trendy,” Dani growls. “I swear she said ‘hip’.”
We pull into a dirt lot centered by a Quonset hut on stilts. A lopsided neon sign on the tin roof blinks ‘Paradisiac’ in seamy blues and reds.
“She booked us in a tiki hut?” Dani yelps and the baby wakes with a startled, “Da?”
I stop alongside the stilts and a wave of freezing air whooshes into the car as Mary, in a voluminous navy parka, yanks open the passenger door.
“Isn’t this place cute?” she squeals. “It’s all the rage! Ooo. Gimme the baby. I want to show her off to my friends!”
“Mary,” Dani says, watching her child—the tiny mittens flailing excitedly—disappear into Mary’s parka. “Are you sure it’s okay to take my baby inside? Because, Mary,” she says, lunging across the seat and blocking the door from closing with her shoulder. “As I told you a million times, in California it’s illegal to bring a baby into a bar. Are you sure you checked?”
“It’ll be fine,” Mary assures us from the top step of the Paradisiac. “We’re known here!”
She vanishes through a dingy set of saloon doors, one door taking longer than the other to swing shut.
“She didn’t check,” Dani says. “Hah.” She slaps her hands to her face. “We’re screwed.”
Mary’s husband sticks his head in the crap mobile and asks if we need help unloading.
"I can grab the amp in the minivan," he offers, teeth chattering.
“Maybe she did check,” I tell Dani. “Let’s just get the gear in the bar.”
"We're screwed," Dani mutters, but she packs up her guitar.
I leap out of the crap mobile, then back in for my parka. Even with a coat on, it’s cold—a vicious, burrowing cold I never experience in Los Angeles. Arms loaded, the three of us struggle up the warped staircase and hesitate at the saloon doors. From inside the Paradisiac, blood curdling whoops, shit-yeah’s, thumpings and poundings rise to a climax.
“Um—football game, I think,” Mary’s husband says miserably, adding, “I hate this place.”
I raise my brows at Dani.
“Oh, for crap’s sake,” she growls and kicks the saloon doors open with her gypsy boots. She barges inside. After meekly insisting the other go first, Mary’s husband and I follow, squeezing through the doorway at the same time.
The first thing we see is Mary weeping.
“Babies are illegal in bars,” she sobs.
Dani glares at her.
“I never get out,” Mary wails, tears spotting her J Crew. “I just want an evening out!”
I glance at Mary’s husband. He is mouthing a giant don’t to Mary, but this makes her cry harder.
Dani dumps her gear in the sawdust. “Get me the frikkin’ manager,” she growls, taking the baby from Mary.
“I’ll introduce you,” Mary cries, hope in her face and she and Dani head for the longest bar in the world.
I stand in the middle of the Paradisiac with Mary’s husband, our arms aching from the loads we bear. We glance at each other, shrug, then check out the place. Pool tables crowd the back of the room, lit by red and white hanging lamps declaring Budweiser. The same red faux leather booths found in cheesy Hollywood diners line the walls, crammed in patrons, as are the wooden tables crowding a floor coated in sawdust. Behind us is a juke box and an ice machine the size of several Frigidaires. To our left is the mahogany bar, lined two-deep with locals cheering at a TV bolted high on the wall. Stetsons and bandannas cover the heads of a local melting pot—Asians, whites, Hispanics and Navajo, everyone in jeans, cowboy boots, glinting belt buckles the size of envelopes, chunky turquoise jewelry weighting fingers and ears. The eyes that meet mine are inquisitive—and many—and I suddenly realize that everyone—at the pool tables, in the booths, at the bar—every single person in the Paradisiac is staring at me.
I blink at the sawdust, struggling.
In my motorcycle boots, I’m over six feet tall (if I stand up straight), lanky, hip-less as a guy. A thick mane of blonde hair zig zags to my ass. My right eye scrunches up more than the left when I'm nervous and crow’s feet fan jubilantly when I smile. I know the combination of blonde hair and freaky height makes people stare at me. I know it’s not because I’m beautiful—but odd-ish. Still, when it happens, when I’m scrutinized from supermarkets to bars, laundromats to Starbucks, I want to die.
I'm thinking: This crowd is skinning me alive.
I'm thinking: I can't sing.
I'm thinking: I wish I was dead.
“Are you okay?” Mary’s husband asks.
I watch sawdust waft over my motorcycle boots and miss the man I left for good in Los Angeles, a man so tall and imposing I could bask in his shadow wherever we went. With him, I was tiny—pickuppable—Faye Wray in Kong’s palm—cupped and covered. Safe.
I thought.
You were different, he told me. Prone on a yardsale sofa in the living room, he watched the surgery channel—a knee operation—one deep, revealing and bloody. I was loading his refrigerator with groceries. I was washing dishes. I was changing the sheets, devoting my day to brightening his squalid Hollywood bungalow. When I first met you, he emphasized, you were different. You stood up straight, ordered drinks at the bar, had the confidence of a movie star, even though you’re not hot enough to be a movie star—but you had presence. Now? You hide, my lover said watching a scalpel make a fresh slice.
I’m on an insecurity kick, I responded, whisking a feather duster over the TV screen. Be patient?
I’m too old for patience, he growled, thirty-six and grieving for a mother he never paid attention to, who died in her sleep while I watched him lose money in Vegas. The man was an orphan and resented it. The man was a baby and I loved him. I want action, he said.
Excuse me, I said, blocking the TV. Did I not just nurse you through a mid-life crisis? Help you quit smoking? Cheerlead all the way? You asked me not to buy drinks at the bar. You said it was crude.
Hold it against me, he replied, handsome in his anger.
Look, I’m not—
I’m not your daddy, he interrupted and I just stared at him.
What?
You’re not old enough for me, he said.
I’m older than you are!
Nope, he said and swigged beer. You’re—back-up. I want an equal.
My legs shook.
Back-up, he said, pointing the remote at the TV and pressing up the volume. That’s all you’ll ever be.
“What?” Mary’s husband asks. I’m standing as straight as if I’ve been slammed against a wall and he’s shrunk to about a foot below me. I speak to the mole in his bald spot.
“I want to know where we set up?”
“Um.” He squints around the Paradisiac uncertainly and I feel my courage ebb—but suddenly he does a Groucho Marx with his eyebrows. “Over there?” he suggests.
I look over my shoulder and see what he means—several feet of free floor space in front of the ice machine.
“Stick to my butt,” I tell Mary’s husband with a wink and for the first time since I've met him, he smiles. I march to the ice machine and begin setting up the electric piano, microphone stands, positioning the amp all without knowing what I’m doing, never having set up a musical stage in my life.
“Looks like you’ve got it under control,” Mary’s husband says nervously. “I’ll go check on the girls.”
“You do that,” I reply.
I am cross-legged on the floor under the electric piano, hung in mystifying cords when Dani’s gypsy boots halt at my knees.
“Okay! Baby stays in the back room with the beer,” she says. Hands deep in the pockets of her blue overalls, she surveys the gear. “Watched over by Mary, or one of her nurse pals. They’ll take shifts. For crap's sake, Arabella! What have you done?”
She hauls me out from under the piano.
“Just go buy the cognac, okay?” she snaps.
I salute her and head for the bar. Three sips of cognac before singing a note, otherwise you can kiss your gig goodbye. Dani told me this as I lay crumpled on my futon in my studio apartment, sobbing and cursing myself. You can come with me. You can be my back-up. He doesn’t deserve you. I deserve you, she insisted, massaging my shoulders. Arabella, listen to me—in Western France the grapes are full of shit that makes you sing! You have to try it, babe.
“Well, we have two kinds,” the bartender says after having me repeat my request. He blows dust from the unopened bottles and raises them high for the benefit of those at the bar. “Which would you like?”
Everyone looks at me.
My right eye scrunches up.
“The most expensive?” I say and everyone talks at once. I hear catchwords like 'Hollywood' and 'Sin City'. The local at my elbow, the most boisterous man in the Paradisiac, roars, “Why the hell would you drink that crap before you sing a song, Hollywood?”
Mutters of agreement up and down the bar.
I turn to the man. His eyes are on fire and he looks as though a brutal inner script has been hacking away at his guts for years.
“In Western France,” I tell him, “the grapes are full of shit that makes you sing.”
His face turns red and terrifying and I feel a slouch start to creep into my shoulders, that one eye of mine scrunching to a slit—but he laughs and whacks his jeans with his cowboy hat.
“You’re brassy, Hollywood,” he roars, pounding his giant fist on the bar.
Loud agreement from everyone.
I grab the cognac and return to Dani. She has rearranged our musical stage and made my microphone stand flush with hers. With the rock solid heel of my motorcycle boot, I scoot the base back a few paces.
“What are you doing?” Dani hisses in a voice straight from ‘The Exorcist’. Her head shakes eerily. She can’t stop blinking.
“Dani—I’m back-up. Remember?”
“Back-up,” Dani hisses. “Is that really what you think you are?”
There’s that Dani running through a field of daisies with her baby in her arms giggling like Titania after she’s been bewitched and there’s this Dani, Devil-Dani, consumed with fear.
“Yes. I think that I am back-up.”
I have never snapped at my best friend before. Dani looks as though I’ve just slapped her face. For once, she is speechless.
“Hey Hollywood,” the boisterous patron roars. I look over at him. His forehead glows with sweat. The thick fingers around his beer bottle tremble. “How the hell do you expect to get anywhere?”
I stare at him until he raises his hands as though under arrest.
“You got something to say?” he demands.
Everyone looks at me.
“Watch me step on glass.”
I scoot the mic back in line with Dani’s and hand her a snifter. We take the three sips of cognac, scowl at each other, then double over laughing.
“Babe,” she tells me. “I didn’t think you had a temper! Just relax, okay? We’ll be fine. I think. Ready?”
I clamp my fingers around the mic’s stem, part my legs and lock my
knees. “Ready.”
Dani turns to the Paradisiac.
“Hey, everybody,” she crows into her mic. “Testing one, two, three!”
She attacks the piano, launching into ‘Someday Sister’ and on cue I sing all harmonies. On the final chorus fear still freezes my shoulders, my right eye still scrunches and Dani still looks possessed, but it’s the best we’ve ever sung the song and we nod at each other, thrilled. We dive into ‘Playground of Commitment’ and I don’t miss a beat. Dani switches from piano to guitar and we sing those songs. After a while, she introduces us, hurling sassy, small-talky bits at the patrons of the Paradisiac while I recover, severely proud of our performance. I curl my toes gleefully in my motorcycle boots. I take three sips of cognac in one.
I breathe.
And then it hits me.
Dani is talking, but no one in the Paradisiac is listening. Conversation rages from the pool tables and booths. Mary is the loudest patron of all, holding court with her friends, shouting in run-ons, laughing like a maniac.
“Arabella,” Dani hisses, her eyes dark balls of panic. "We're invisible!"
“Just sing,” I say hoarsely, fear spreading across my body like I’ve been iced. The Paradisiac is filled with hooligans who pound their fists on tables, upset their beer, send balls flying from the pool tables and kick the sawdust into clouds. Mary has grown to the size of a blustery sci-fi being, her shrill laugh penetrating all of Gallup. Heartbroken, Dani turns to her mic—then to me again.
“Arabella,” she hisses.
“For crap’s sake, Dani—sing!”
“I can't,” she hisses. “We’ve finished the set!”
I reel from my mic, counting on my fingers, but she’s right and we still have plenty of time to fill.
We stare at each other, horrified.
“Laydeeth!”
From the back of the bar a man wearing a bright red tee shirt with OWNER emblazoned across the chest in ivory letters approaches us. He is far taller than me, than any man I have ever seen, his chest a frigate, his arms tree trunks. He wields a wooden stool in one burly hand, a yellow plastic bucket in the other. Dani and I watch him bear down on us, unable to move. The man slams the stool in front of the piano, slams the bucket on the seat and grins. We stare at the gap where his front teeth should be.
“Thorry I’m late. My dog egaped my yard.” He turns to the whole of the Paradisiac and shouts, “Tipth!”
There is a minor stampede. Dani and I choke on the flying sawdust, but when the air clears, dollar bills nestle in the yellow bucket—lots of dollar bills.
“Arabella,” Dani says, gaping at the money. “Have you ever been tipped?”
“Um—no.”
She turns to me and a fierce light (the good light, the kind light, the artist’s light) radiates from her eyes.
“Babe,” she says. “That stepping on glass crap you mentioned earlier? Let’s do it.” She turns to her mic. “Excuse me, Mary? This frikkin’ song’s for you!”
We repeat our set and by the last song the tips bucket is full. As Dani is about to close the show, a skinny middle-aged woman wearing jeans and red cowboy boots, her braided hip-length hair the silver of dimes, tip-toes over to us.
“Do you,” she asks apologetically, “know any Carole King?”
I shake my head as Dani nods hers.
“Jesus,” Dani says as the woman tip-toes back to the bar. “Our first request!”
“But we haven’t rehearsed—”
“Stifle that, babe. And wing it.”
Dani informs the noisy patrons of the Paradisiac that our last song is a request and then she launches into ‘You’ve Got A Friend’.
I'm not the only one shocked by the harmonies flying from my mouth. Dani looks at me, her eyes huge with delight. Her fingers drift from the piano and we sing acapella. As easily as the fear hardened me, it lets me go. My shoulders drop. My fists unclench. My right eye unscrunches. We release the mics from their stands and meet in front of the piano, shoulder to shoulder. For the first time in two weeks of rehearsing and an hour of performing, we blend like we’ve ached to.
The skinny woman creeps into the center of the room and sways there, her eyes closed. People abandon the pool tables and join her. People gaze at us from the booths. My boisterous friend at the bar takes his cowboy hat off, his great face damp with tears. Even Mary listens, her arms hooked with her friends, her husband hugging her from behind.
Dani and I hang onto the final note, taking it places we didn’t know we could go together. The bar explodes with applause and whoops, thumpings and shit-yeah’s.
“We punched a hole, babe,” Dani yells in my ear, hugging me fiercely. “We shot on up and punched a hole!”
Back at the house, we dump our tips on the hearth and count out two hundred and forty-eight dollars and some odd change—gas and fast food money and then some for the ride home to California. Mary hands out goblets of chardonnay and proposes a toast.
“To Dani and Arabella,” she says, tears in her eyes. “Simon and Garfunkel, watch out!”
“You guys,” Mary’s husband says softly, “made my wife feel so good tonight.”
Mary snorts derisively—then sees her husband’s face. She bites her lip and puts her head on his shoulder. “Thank you,” she tells us, “for a super night out.”
Around three a.m., Rachel wanders in, bleary-eyed, thumb in her mouth. She climbs in my lap and falls asleep.
“You’re so great with kids,” Mary tells me and whereas in the recent past being ‘great with kids’ is something that never occurred to me, to hear it now fills me with wonder and pride. I stroke Rachel's blonde hair, watching her breathe.
Near dawn, Dani and I sit before the fire, quietly hashing out plans.
“San Francisco,” Dani says, “in August. Santa Barbara in September. We’ll hit Hollywood in October, when the city is rockin’ and it’s festivals for us from then on, babe. Prepare for travel!”
For a moment I feel the old dread when she mentions Los Angeles, the towering man I left, everything I dared.
“I’ve been traveling with the wrong man,” I mutter.
“Babe,” Dani gasps, her eyes glazing over. “Mega brain bloat!”
She stares into the fire, composing.
I wander to the blinds and peek out at night on the reservation—only it’s not night. A mysterious pink splashes the sky—and something else.
“Dani,” I whisper, motioning her over. “Check out this brain bloat.”
She joins me at the window.
“Traveling with the wrong man,” she sings softly. “Share my secrets with the moon—hm, hm—snowflakes in May.”