Page 85 of The Lonely Road

In the evening, we eat together with the easy camaraderie that comes from everyone knowing everyone.

The food is set out on long tables at the east edge of the grounds, covered in cloth that keeps the flies off and the warmth in.

Frybread, pulled in rough rounds and stacked in towers.

Bison stew in a large pot.

Blue corn mush beside it, thick and warm, with a crock of butter that’s half gone by the time we arrive.

Squash roasted beforehand and brought in covered pans.

Wojapi—the berry pudding Wíitsin made every year and now Auntie Carol—is delicious with chokecherry and plum, thick and dark and sweet-sour in a way that doesn’t translate to any other flavor on earth.

Mason eats everything.

“Good?” I ask when he eats frybread.

“I don’t understand how this is legal,” he says, taking another bite, making me feel like I won the lottery with him.

Auntie Carol, who isn’t even pretending not to listen, makes a sound of deep satisfaction and puts another piece on his plate.

I feel something I haven’t felt in a very long time: the uncomplicated pleasure of bringing someone I care about into something I love.

I once brought a law school friend, but she’d spent the whole time taking photographs on her phone, and I knew by noon that that was the last time.

Mason hasn’t even checked his phone.

I’ve been coming here since I was four years old, and I am at home now as I was then.

My earliest memory is sitting on Wíitsin’s lap, watching the line of women, not yet understanding that the observing was preparation. And that one day I would stand in that line. That the ceremony would pass through me the way it had passed through her, through her grandmother, through every woman in our family who had dressed carefully on a morning in May and come to this ground and stepped forward when it was time.

She made my first shawl.

The blue one I’m wearing today is not my first. That one fell apart years ago, worn past its life with the enthusiasm of a child who wore it to school twice and had to be gently discouraged. But she made this one too, cobalt with a stepped diamond pattern and a butterfly motif.

Cam is stuck to Mason, who has become his new favorite person, and Mason doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

He’s comfortable with children.

He’ll make a good father, I think, and I am immediately shocked by my line of thought. It’s been just a short time since we’ve known each other, and I’m planning a family with him. Something I didn’t even do with Griffin. With him it was abstract. We’ll get married blah blah—but this is precise—because I can see a boy Cam’s age who looks like Mason, making him smile in an unguarded manner.

During dinner, he rises and walks around for a bit, and when he’s looking out at the mesa, I go stand beside him.

“Well, what’s the verdict?”

He turns to me with the expression he wears when he forgets to be careful—open in a way he can’t quite close before I see it.

“Thank you for bringing me.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

I look at the mesa.

After my first Bear Dance, Wíitsin asked me if I felt it. I was four and didn’t have words for it, but I said yes because I did feel it.

“Good that you did. Remember that feeling. You can always find your way back to it.”

I’ve found my way back to it every year since.