Page 16 of To the Moon and Back

“What are you talking about?”

“You did a bad job rearranging things,” she said. “You’re gonna get caught.”

I wanted to protest. But she was probably right, and she was talking to me, and wasn’t that something?

“I got fired. I need the money for college.”

“Well of course you got fired! We all thought you were trying to, like, go out with a bang?”

I was quiet.

Meredith clicked her tongue. “I’m sure you don’t realize that the sales money goes to the people whose names are on the tags. Not to the gift shop.”

I didn’t answer. The baskets hurt now. They’d leave a mark.

“Steph, I’ll cover for you. I’ll make sure no one sees.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Prove to me I’m right; that you wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. My aunt is one of the basket weavers.”

I knew this already from Beth, who was distantly related to Meredith’s mother and was also a huge gossip.

Meredith had shown up in town the summer before ninth grade, after her family lost their apartment in Tulsa.

For a while the aunt was feeding and housing all of Meredith’s family, and her own family, on baskets.

“I need this, Meredith.”

“There are more important things,” she said carefully, “than you being an astronaut. Or you going to some Ivy League school. Or you just deciding for yourself who has to like you, and then being super weird when they don’t fall in line.”

I pressed the baskets closer to me, felt them stretch against themselves with the little bit of give in their weave.

“You don’t get it,” I said. “I have to leave. I don’t have a choice, and you’ve never even asked me why. In all the years we’ve known each other, you still think it’s just a stupid space dream.”

“ Steph ,” Meredith said. “We haven’t known each other. You don’t know anything about me.”

I unlocked the stall door. She was beautiful, with that hard look in her eyes, with her ripped shorts and loose shirt and the dusty bag slung over her shoulder. Like she was already gone. I felt tears on the way and cleared my throat. I was humiliated.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Can you tell me about you?”

Meredith made a huffing sound, like she wanted to laugh, and she adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “I’m clocking out,” she said.

I nodded.

At the restroom door, she turned. “Do what you want. I don’t care enough to tell anyone, and I’ll be glad when you’re gone.”

I stood on the courthouse steps, between my mother and sister.

I didn’t listen to Brett’s campaign speech, not at first. I was angry with him for hurting our mother, after knowing her past with men.

I felt sorry for her, but I needed her to get herself together this time.

No matter how sad she got, I promised myself I wouldn’t stay back.

I remembered our last night as a family, before our mother had asked him to leave.

We were together in the living room. The television was set to a station with flames flickering across the screen, like we had a fireplace, and Kayla was painting Kituwah mound on a large canvas on the floor.

So far it looked honest, low and grassy, unremarkable for a holy place.

I was taken aback. It was like there’d been a film over her art all these years, thin and glittery, and maybe she was starting to peel it back.

I sat sideways on the couch, writing poems about space in my geo-journal, and Brett held my feet on his lap. He talked and laughed with our mother across the room; she was kneading bread in a plastic bowl.

“It’s a miracle,” Kayla said, still crouched over her canvas. Our mother never made bread outside of the bread factory, and she was so good at it.

“Please,” our mother said. “You know, your dad’s running his campaign on bread. We were working on his speech last night. Brett, did you tell them?”

He laughed and covered his face, like he was embarrassed at the attention. The next day, I would think it was because of what he knew he was doing to us, and what our mother had called him for the last time. Your dad.

Brett’s platform was actually centered on gadugi, his favorite principle: everyone working together for the common good.

Literally it meant putting together the bread, gadu, like the collective task of keeping people fed.

But I didn’t want to be part of the shared responsibility of my community.

If I gave them nothing and they gave me nothing, that should be fair, too.

From the steps of the old courthouse, I looked out at the small crowd.

They had those little paper fans stapled onto Popsicle sticks, printed with Brett’s last name that wasn’t ours and the words “CHEROKEE FAMILIES CHEROKEE STRONG,” and they were waving them at their cheeks and nodding like there was a rhythm to what he was saying, like it was a song.

The words came out one after another, flowing up and down, his voice sliding soft and deep when he talked about our struggles, climbing higher and louder when he said to forget about just surviving, because we would be wise , we would be strong , we would make our people proud .

Maybe Brett would really do all that. Standing there, watching him, I wasn’t sure if he would. Or if he could, if he was even a good man. But right then, being part of this people didn’t feel like knowing how to cure a snake-bite in the woods, or how to take pride in our ancestors.

It was my mother, tall in a bright red dress and heels, staring straight ahead, doing what she could for something they must have talked about many times.

Maybe on the worn couch in the house late at night, when they’d shared dreams and daughters.

It was my sister, too proud to hold my hand.

But her shoulder still pressed firm against mine, and her long hair tickled my arm.

Brett finished his speech with a whole thing about family, about our family.

Our support and love and guidance, Kayla and me and our mother and his mother—there was a joke to be made about all the women in his life, but he was smart enough not to make it.

He looked at us as he talked, and his voice reached out to us.

He said we made his life good and important.

I knew, already or all at once, that I would not be like him. I believed nothing in Oklahoma, nothing in Brett’s life or my mother’s life or the life of anyone I knew, could make my life good or important.

“Cherokee Families! Cherokee Strong!” shouted someone in the back.

“ Yes! ” Brett said. “That’s what we got. Our Cherokee families make us strong now, as a nation. Always have. And, if given the great privilege of serving as your principal chief, I plan to honor the family, once again, as the bedrock of this nation.

“That means more family reunifications, more Cherokee kids fostered or adopted by Cherokee families. Our children are the promise of our continued existence.

“That means getting working mothers and single mothers the financial support and career training that they need to build strong homes. That means subsidized housing for our young people and our elders, for hardworking people down on their luck. That means improved access to balanced, traditional diets. That means stronger, more comprehensive tribal health care starting from the moment our precious children come into this world. That means—”

Beth stood in the back of the crowd.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d found her naked, beside Brett in my mother’s bed. I had come home early from school that day, sick.

I didn’t tell my mother. That night, he told her himself. He left out my part in it, to save me the shame of having hidden it from her. He didn’t know I’d been hiding it already, for two long years.

After that, Brett and my mother worked out some kind of deal: he continued to live with us and father us, still, albeit with long and mysterious absences. And Beth disappeared from our lives. I felt sure that Brett would leave us for good, maybe soon, but I couldn’t know when.

Beth looked at Brett from her place in the back, smiling, the top of her hair shining in the sun.

I would sell the baskets. I would run.

I watched Beth watch Brett.

It was how my mother would look at him, back when things were okay.

Brett on the couch with us little girls on his lap and our mother standing barefoot in the doorway, watching him, unwashed hair falling into her face.

The ancient green pajama pants with the splat of red paint at the knee, the way the two of them used to laugh.

Smiling, smiling, like the rest of us weren’t even there.