Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,63
was a full-blooded Arapaho. She grew up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, but after her father died, her mother had married a white man, which caused a serious rift between her and Blossom. As soon as she turned eighteen, Blossom moved to Boulder and began waitressing and taking classes at the community college. She intended to go to CU, but she got pregnant by a man who left her. She wound up quitting school and taking in sewing to pay for the little tract house next door to the one where my parents lived when Sam and I were little.
Some of my strongest memories from those years involve the smell of cotton and the sight of yards and yards of color spread across John’s living room and kitchen. Blossom would screech at Sam and me to stay away from her material, cursing us in both English and Hinóno’eitíít, the Arapaho word for their native language. I learned the Arapaho words for “filthy white monster” before I could ride a bike.
At the time, I thought Blossom was a merciless witch, but looking back, I can have sympathy for her: a young single mother, trying to keep the rambunctious neighbor kids away from her only way to put food on the table. She worked day and night—I didn’t remember seeing her without a mouthful of needles and a measuring tape around her neck until I was at least eight.
My dad—my real dad—started Luther Shoes out of our little tract house, and when it began to take off, he hired the best seamstress he knew to oversee the stitching. Blossom worked for Luther Shoes for years, and during that time, John more or less lived at my house. My mother helped him with his homework just like she did with Sam and me, and he ate dinner with us every night. Sometimes Blossom, who had never experienced much freedom because she’d had John so young, would take advantage of the free childcare and go out, and John would end up camped on the living room floor. By the time we were ten, his sleeping bag had a permanent place in the corner by the couch. The three of us were inseparable—not like a brother and sisters, exactly, but like best friends who had been given the extraordinary gift of never being separated. We accepted him as a permanent part of our world, as only children could.
Those were great years, but when we were fifteen, Blossom and my dad had a falling out. The company was growing so fast that he needed to move all stitching to machines, even the special orders. Blossom was a brilliant seamstress, but not exactly a people person, and he hired someone else to manage the team over her. He kept her in the sewing department and drastically overpaid her—my dad was passionate about rewarding talent—but Blossom’s ego was wounded. She quit in a now-legendary public tantrum, and forbade John from ever returning to our house.
John did not take that well. He may have been quieter and gentler than his fierce mother, but in his own way he was just as stubborn. He went to court, became legally emancipated, and moved in with us. By then my parents had bought their dream house in Mapleton, which came with a small apartment over the garage. John had his own space, and we had our best friend only a few feet away.
The last couple of years of high school were complex and rich and mostly wonderful for the three of us, but Blossom never forgave John for choosing us over her. She saw John’s decision as a betrayal not just of his mother, but of his entire heritage. She accused him and my parents of some ugly things, including racism and brainwashing. If Sam and I were around, she would scream at us too, trying to shame us by implying that we were teenage seductresses who’d poisoned John’s mind by tempting his body.
By then, though, Sam and I understood that Blossom had completely missed the point. John chose us because he knew us better than he knew Blossom, and he understood that we loved him—because we told him so. For John, it was really that simple.
After high school, John went years without speaking to his prickly mother. It was actually Sam who eventually reached out to her mother-in-law, declaring that she wanted her new baby to know both sides of her heritage. Blossom may have been a shit mother,