“Uh-oh,” Earlene says, noticing the sugar volcano.

“I made a little mess,” Annawake admits.

“You know what that means. Means somebody’s a-gettin’

a new sweetheart.” Earlene looks at the two women, beaming.

“Which one, you reckon? I know Annawake’s on the market.

How about you, you married, hon?” she asks Alice.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Alice replies. Earlene laughs so hard her bosom heaves and the coffee slides dangerously in the glass pot.

“I’ll bring back a rag directly and get that up,” she says.

“I’m sorry if it takes me a while to get back to you. I’m the only one here today. You all want the soup of the day? It’s beef barley, it’s real good.”

“That would be fine,” Alice says, and Annawake nods.

Their water glasses vibrate with Earlene’s footsteps as she makes her way back to the kitchen.

“There’s one thing you left out,” Alice says. “In my speech.”

“What’s that?” Annawake blows into her coffee.

Alice looks out the window when she speaks. “She was abused.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Alice takes her straight on now. “That’s not enough. You don’t know what that child goes through. She’s still not over it. Whenever she feels like she’s done something wrong, or if she thinks Taylor’s leaving, she just…I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s like her body’s still there but her mind gets disconnected some way. It’s awful to watch.”

“It must be,” Annawake says.

“What I think,” Alice says, folding her paper napkin, “is that you people had your chance, and now it’s Taylor’s turn.

And she’s doing a good job.”

For the first time Annawake feels a stirring of animosity.

“When you say ‘you people,’ who do you mean exactly?

Indians in general, or just the Cherokee Nation?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t see how a thing like that could happen to a little baby girl.”

“I don’t know why it happens here, because we love our children more than money. And there are almost always enough good-hearted people in a family to fill in for the hardship cases.”

“Everybody loves kids, that’s nothing new under the sun,” Alice states. “Except the ones that don’t.”

“I don’t think you understand what I mean.” Annawake’s jaw tenses with this familiar frustration: explaining her culture to someone who believes America is all one country. She thinks about what she wants to say, and sees in her mind family, a color, a notion as fluid as river. She tells Alice, “I used to work at the Indian hospital at Claremore, checking people in. Sometimes it would be years before we’d get straight who a kid’s mother was, because one aunt or another would bring him in. Maybe the mother was too young, so another family member raised him. It’s not a big deal who’s the exact mother.”

Alice blinks, taking this in. “So with all this love going around, how does it happen that somebody walks up to my daughter’s parked car one night and gives a baby away?”

Annawake watches two girls passing by outside on the street, Flossie Deal’s granddaughters, she thinks. They are walking fast, with earnest, bobbing heads, the way only adolescent girls can move. Annawake also had speeches in her head, and she too has forgotten them, or lost her introduc-tions. “God knows why,” she says. “What’s happened to us is that our chain of caretaking got interrupted. My mom’s generation.” Annawake feels her stomach harden. “Federal law put them in boarding school. Cut off their hair, taught them English, taught them to love Jesus, and made them spend their entire childhoods in a dormitory. They got to see their people maybe twice a year. Family has always been our highest value, but that generation of kids never learned how to be in a family. The past got broken off.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” Alice says.

“Yeah. The ones my age are the casualties. We have to look farther back than our parents, sometimes, to find out how to behave.” Annawake feels unsteady. “The woman who gave Turtle to your daughter, I think I could probably tell you her sad alcoholic one-bad-man-after-another story. She gave Turtle up because she had no idea how to save a baby from repeating that life. But I also know that baby fell out of a family that loved her, and she’s missed.”