“Have you eaten?”
Justine shook her head. Nurse Sixkiller took her in with her warm, brown eyes, head to toe and back to belly, before leading her into her office and closing the door. “When was your last period?”
Justine shrugged.
“You don’t keep track?”
Dee and Josie, who’d been getting ready to marry or graduate around the time Justine needed to learn about such things, probably thought Lula had talked to her like she’d talked to them. But Justine’s Lula wasn’t their Lula. She hadn’t told Justine anything.
Nurse Sixkiller handed her a small pocket calendar with a ridiculous yellow smiley face on it. “I want you to mark the day you start from here on out.” She didn’t let go of the calendar until Justine looked up at her. “Let me know?” She seemed finished but then: “Your family is Holiness, right?”
Justine held up the hem of her long skirt and sighed.
“Well, you need to go to the clinic anyway. If you need me to talk to your mom with you . . . or if need be, I can take you to the Indian Hospital. Do you know what you want to do?”
Justine grew hollow. She felt as if all of her insides were spilling out, and she cupped her tight belly to check. Around her, the white-and-green tile floor shifted. She wondered if she might fall, but Nurse Sixkiller placed a hand against the small of her back and kept talking.
“I want you to know there’s a doctor in Tulsa. He will take what money you can pay.”
Justine was out the door before she heard the rest. She understood what the nurse was getting at. She kept going down the hallway and out the big metal doors, leaving her open algebra book on the desk in the back row of Ms. Peterson’s class for good.
6.
When Justine walked in the door and smelled frying wild onions and salt pork, she felt as if she hadn’t eaten in a year. Granny turned from her work over the propane stove and smiled. “Always know when it’s ready, an’it? Rinse this,” Granny said, flapping two old bread bags at Justine. “And get plates.”
Justine washed the bags that had held frozen spring onions and hung them inside out. Then she got hot sauce from the cabinets and a bottle of Dr Pepper, Granny’s favorite indulgence, from the icebox.
“Think there’s beans left in there,” Granny said. “No school?” She handed Justine the plate of pork and began breaking eggs into the cast-iron skillet on top of the long, skinny onions.
“I didn’t feel good.”
“You call Lula’s work?”
“Not yet.”
“Eat. Then better call.” Granny sat down with the wild onions and scrambled eggs, but she didn’t begin to eat. Justine felt the silence between them more than she heard it. She put her fork down on the table and took a deep breath. Granny tilted the hot sauce toward her. When Justine waved it off, Granny asked, “Sick a lot?”
Justine’s heart sank. Had someone stuck a sign to her back? Why had her body chosen today to reveal her secrets to the world? Or maybe it had been blabbing for some time to anybody who cared to listen.
“You okay?”
Justine shook her head.
“Been a long time?”
Justine shrugged.
Granny adjusted her hearing aid, seemed to be thinking. Finally she said, “There’s medicine, but maybe it’s too long already.” She paused again. “I don’t remember where to find it anymore. Celia knows maybe.”
“Before summer,” Justine said. Granny spooned food onto her plate and opened the hot sauce.
“Too long, I think,” she said. “Somebody hurt you?”
Justine couldn’t lie to her, so she said nothing. She hoped Granny would go on eating, but the room grew quiet. Granny covered her mouth with her hand. Grease had made the deep ridges of her nails and swollen knuckles shiny. She took off her glasses and began to wipe her eyes with a dish towel.
Justine could not see Granny cry. She pushed herself away from the table, walked out the door, and began to run in the hot sun. At the road, she turned west and kept going. She did not stop until she came to Little Locust Creek. She took off her shoes and sat on the edge of the bank, crying until her body stopped making tears and the sound of her dry-socket wails made her lonely. Then she wiped her eyes on her blouse and hugged her knees into her chest, seeing where she was for the first time. It had been dark, but this was where he had stopped the car.
On the far side of the creek, seven buzzards filled a tree whose dead, gray branches spidered into the sky. The great black birds eyed her and ruffled themselves from time to time but were mostly content opening their lazy wings to the sun. She put her feet in the cool water and flipped rocks with her toes, watching red crawdads skitter away into the deep. She felt like a crawdad today. She’d run from Nurse Sixkiller, a kind woman only trying to help, and now she’d run from Granny, who Justine loved as if she were an extension of her own heart. A fat, nearly black cottonmouth S’ed across from the buzzard’s side of the creek, holding its bully head high above the water. Justine grabbed a stick and stood, waving it over her head, stomping and screaming at the snake to leave her be. It drew near and opened its white maw until it saw that she was a crazy creature not worth fooling with. Then it turned and went back through the pool and disappeared into the weeds along the bank.
Justine sat back down. She made sure that the snake was gone and checked in on the buzzards before she bowed her head and started at the beginning. Not her first birth, but her second, when her father left and they lost their car and their house and Lula had her first nervous breakdown, all at once like that, leaving eight-year-old Justine and her two big sisters to pack their piddly boxes and figure out a way to get them to Granny’s house on their own. It wasn’t fair that her mom had to drop out of college, that they had to eat powdered commodity eggs and fight over the cheese, that they hadn’t had bacon since he left, or that Granny had to share her room with Lula. It wasn’t fair that Justine was one of the best athletes in her class but couldn’t join the basketball team because men would see her legs. It wasn’t fair that Justine had caused one of Lula’s nervous breakdowns herself or that in the midst of it, Lula, out of her mind, had whipped Justine so badly that she couldn’t sleep under a sheet. It wasn’t fair that Justine was made to fear for her soul over a Beatles album or a stupid roller coaster she didn’t even get to ride. It wasn’t fair that she was so angry over it all when every little thought she had would probably require forgiveness. She was just a girl, and she told God so. She didn’t know what to do next, so she kept talking. Sometimes she yelled.
She went on so long that when she heard a big engine rumbling and opened her eyes, the world went white for a minute. When she could focus, she saw an ancient Chevy truck easing into the creek from the two-track on the far bank. The engine cut off, and two little kids stripped out of their clothes and clambered out of the truck bed. A woman and a man, both laughing about something he said, stepped out of the truck too. As the woman tied up her skirt, she grinned at Justine and waved, “Siyo!” Then she called for the man, who was already splashing the kids, to get back over there. The woman spoke Cherokee, but Justine knew she was telling him to grab a bucket and some rags and help her. While the woman and man soaped the truck, the two little kids found the
