Page 81 of The Lonely Road

Then she takes my hand. “Come on. I see Auntie Carol.”

Auntie Carol is a small woman with a density that has nothing to do with her size. She takes Taya from me without ceremony, engulfs her, holds her the way you hold someone you’ve been quietly worrying about from a distance, and Taya lets herself be held with a completeness she doesn’t allow in Wildflower Canyon—her shoulders dropping, something releasing that she carries so consistently I’d stopped noticing it was carried.

When Auntie Carol releases her, she looks at me.

“Mason,” Taya says. “This is Auntie Carol.”

Auntie Carol’s dress is deep burgundy velvet with white beadwork at the collar. She looks at me the way small, powerful women look at men they haven’t decided about yet.

“You’re taller than I pictured,” she says.

“Auntie Carol,” Taya mutters.

“It’s an observation.” Then, because Taya is giving her daggers, Auntie Carol raises an eyebrow. “You told Sienna, and I got it out of her.”

Taya throws her hands up.

“If I didn’t do that, I’d never know what’s going on in your life.”

“Auntie Carol manipulates my best friend and me to tell on each other,” Taya explains to me.

“I’m gathering information.” Auntie Carol winks at me and steers us toward the communal dining tables.

Elder Nokoni takes me around when Taya drifts off to find Sienna.

“They’ll talk a mile a minute,” he says. “Come on.”

Walking with an Elder means that people stop continuously—to shake his hand, to exchange a word, to show him a grandchild. He takes it all with the patience of a man who understands that this is also part of the ceremony. Near the corral, he introduces me to the Bear Dance Chief, a busy man who makes time to shake my hand and welcome me. If I weren’t already feeling like an impostor for being here under false pretenses, I was now.

“How does one become Bear Dance Chief?” I ask as Nokoni walks me toward the dining area.

“Lineage and mentorship,” he says. He hands me a cup of something pale and cold.

I look at the drink, then at him.

“No alcohol on the Bear Dance grounds,” he says, with the mild satisfaction of a man who enjoys delivering this information.

“Of course.”

“This is sumac lemonade. John here adds honey.”

John, who is pouring drinks nearby, nods. “Also maple syrup. I’m experimenting.”

We stand by the corral and drink—Nokoni is having watermelon juice—and he tells me about the Bear Dance Chief’s grandfather, Edward Box Senior, who spent forty years as the tribe’s spiritual leader and who brought these ceremonies back into the light after decades of suppression.

“Did you know that from the 1880s until 1933, the U.S. government enforced the Code of Indian Offenses?” Nokoni says. “Traditional dances and ceremonies were essentially criminalized. And even after the ban was eased, the courage required to bring these practices back—that was its own labor. It wasn’t until 1978 that our right to ceremony was properly protected under law.”

I shake my head. No, I didn’t know. I didn’t even think about it.

He nods slowly. “Edward Box Senior said that knowing even one song allows the tradition to go on.” He looks out at the grounds. “That’s vital, isn’t it—so nothing sacred is lost.”

By the time Nokoni returns me to Taya, I have drunk too many sumac-ades and eaten the best bison stew I’ve ever had.

“You having fun?” Taya asks, her gaze sliding to Nokoni in a way that is asking whether he took good care of me.

“He met the Bear Dance Chief,” Nokoni says, in mock indignation.

Sienna is Taya’s best friend, and I’m uncomfortable meeting her—because she’s the person who will be there to pick up the pieces when I leave, and when the case falls apart. I know this about her before she’s said a word, and it makes me want to apologize before I’ve been introduced.