in a way that struck me somehow as adult, as though he knew that by reading his law book I had inserted myself into his world. His look persisted until I dropped my eyes. I had actually just turned thirteen. Two weeks ago, I’d been twelve.
At work? I said, to break his gaze. I had assumed that he knew where she was, that he’d got the information when he phoned. I knew she was not really at work. She had answered a telephone call and then told me that she was going in to her office to pick up a folder or two. A tribal enrollment specialist, she was probably mulling over some petition she’d been handed. She was the head of a department of one. It was a Sunday—thus the hush. The Sunday afternoon suspension. Even if she’d gone to her sister Clemence’s house to visit afterward, Mom would have returned by now to start dinner. We both knew that. Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening.
And so, you see, her absence stopped time.
What should we do, we both said at once, which was again upsetting. But at least my father, seeing me unnerved, took charge.
Let’s go find her, he said. And even then as I threw on my jacket, I was glad that he was so definite—find her, not just look for her, not search. We would go out and find her.
The car’s had a flat, he declared. She probably drove someone home and the car’s had a flat. These damn roads. We’ll walk down and borrow your uncle’s car and go find her.
Find her, again. I strode along beside him. He was quick and still powerful once he got going.
He had become a lawyer, then a judge, and also married late in life. I was a surprise to my mother, too. My old Mooshum called me Oops; that was his nickname for me, and unfortunately others in the family found it funny. So I am sometimes called Oops to this very day. We went down the hill to my aunt and uncle’s house—a pale green HUD house sheltered by cottonwood and gentrified by three small blue spruce trees. Mooshum lived there too, in a timeless fog. We were all proud of his superlongevity. He was ancient, but still active in the upkeep of the yard. Each day, after his exertions outside, he lay by the window on a cot to rest, a pile of sticks, lightly dozing, sometimes emitting a dry, sputtering sound that was probably laughter.
When my father told Clemence and Edward that my mother had had a flat and we needed their car, as if he actually had knowledge of this mythical flat tire, I almost laughed. He seemed to have convinced himself of the truth of his speculation.
We backed down the gravel drive in my uncle’s Chevrolet and drove to the tribal offices. Circled the parking lot. Empty. Windows dark. As we came back out the entrance, we turned right.
She went to Hoopdance, I’ll bet, said my father. Needed something for dinner. Maybe she was going to surprise us, Joe.
I am the second Antone Bazil Coutts, but I’d fight anyone who put a junior in back of my name. Or a number. Or called me Bazil. I’d decided I was Joe when I was six. When I was eight, I realized that I’d chosen the name of my great-grandfather, Joseph. I knew him mainly as the author of inscriptions in books with amber pages and dry leather bindings. He’d passed down several shelves of these antiquities. I resented the fact that I didn’t have a brand-new name to distinguish me from the tedious Coutts line—responsible, upright, even offhandedly heroic men who drank quietly, smoked an occasional cigar, drove a sensible car, and only showed their mettle by marrying smarter women. I saw myself as different, though I didn’t know how yet. Even then, tamping down my anxiety as we went looking for my mother, who had gone to the grocery store—just that, surely, a little errand—I was aware that what was happening was in the nature of something unusual. A missing mother. A thing that didn’t happen to the son of a judge, even one who