Annawake stares at him, and Franklin wishes she were less beautiful. A treacherous thought, for many different reasons. “It’s such a terrible long shot,” he says. “There may be nothing at all, no relatives, no proof.”

“I know,” Annawake says gently, the same way Pollie would, the way women talk to men: I know, honey. Relax.

“You’ll probably lose what you put into it,” he tells her. “I want to give you free rein, but it’s also my business to look after the investments of time in this office.”

“The Native American Law conference starts on the fif-teenth, so I have to be in Tucson anyway, to give my paper.

That’s where she lives, Tucson. I can just go by and talk to the mother, see what her story is. No big investment.”

“No matter what her story is, a lot of hearts are involved.”

“I know,” Annawake says again, but this is one thing Franklin doesn’t believe she can truly know. She isn’t a mother.

“Can you tell me why you’re sure this is the best thing?”

She presses her curved lips together, thinking. “In law school I slept in the library pretty often. There was a couch in the women’s lounge. After I pass my bar exams they’re probably going to put up a plaque there. The Annawake Fourkiller Couch.”

Franklin smiles. He finds he can picture it.

“People thought my life was so bleak. And I guess it was, so far from home, hearing the ambulances run by all night to the hospital, somebody cracked up or beat up or old and dumped out by their family, and laws jumping up and down in my head. But I always dreamed about the water in Tenkiller. All those perch down there you could catch, any time, you know? A world of free breakfast, waiting to help get you into another day. I’ve never been without that. Have you?”

“No,” he admits. Whether or not he knew it, he was always Cherokee. The fish were down there, for him as much as for Annawake.

“Who’s going to tell that little girl who she is?”

Franklin wants to say, “She will have other things,” but he can’t know this for certain. Franklin wears a Seiko watch and looks as Cherokee as Will Rogers or Elvis Presley or the eighty thousand mixed-blood members of his

Nation, yet he knows he isn’t white because he can’t think of one single generalization about white people that he knows to be true. He can think of half a dozen about Cherokees: They’re good to their mothers. They know what’s planted in their yards. They give money to their relatives, whether or not they’re going to use it wisely. He rotates his chair a little. On his desk is an ugly little duck-shaped paper-clip holder his kids gave him as a present. He told Annawake once that it was his spirit guide. She didn’t laugh.

“Okay,” he says finally, “I trust your judgment on where to go with this.”

Annawake’s mouth moves into its most irresistible presentation, the strange upside-down grin. Her eyes are laughing, not at him, but at something. Crazy chances.

“Thanks, boss,” she says, standing up, touching his desk.

“While I’m in Arizona I’ll see if I can find me a big white horse.”

8

A MORE PERFECT UNION

TAYLOR SITS ON THE FRONT porch steps, hugging her knees, glowering at the indifferent apricot tree. It’s an old knotty thing planted long ago when the house was new, and rarely bears anymore. But this summer it has hit on some prolific internal cycle to bring the neighborhood a bonanza of apricots—and birds.

“If they’d all get together and eat the fruit off one side of the tree, I wouldn’t grudge them,” she tells Lou Ann. “But they just peck a little hole in each one and wreck it.”

Lou Ann looks mournful in spite of her outfit of lime-green Lycra. In ten minutes she has to go lead the Saturday-morning Phenomenal Abdominals class at Fat Chance. She’s come over to Taylor’s porch to wait for her ride. “I thought Jax was going to make a scarecrow,” she says.

“He did.” Taylor points at a cardboard cutout of a great horned owl in the top of the tree. It has realistic eyes and a good deal of feather detail, but is hard to recognize because of all the finches perched on it.

“Poor Turtle,” says Lou Ann, sadly.

“This kills me. Have you ever seen her make a fuss before over something to eat, ever, before this? And now all of a sudden she loves apricots. But she won’t eat one if it’s got a hole pecked in it.”

“I don’t blame her, Taylor. Who wants to eat after a bird?

There’s probably bird diseases.”