six-pack. Everyone stood around the woodstove, breathing and smiling and looking over our new house, which barely had room for all of us. We had to stand close together, Land Trust women cozied up next to mill operator and her boyfriend up against Mike leaning on hardware store manager nestled into Rudy’s hairy back stepping on Frank, children clustered on the floor. We didn’t even have any furniture yet. Our guests couldn’t have been comfortable. They sipped beer and craned past one another to look the place over. Shame choked me. But no one said, Pretty damn small for four people. No one said, Are you planning to fill the gaps? No one said, The rim joist isn’t flush. No one said, Is this floor made of pallets? Is it built directly onto the ground? When I set my beer down on the woodstove, the tilt to the liquid was clearly visible, but no one said, The floor isn’t level. No one said, This house is already sinking by degrees into the wet orange clay. No. Instead Frank clapped me on the back and said, “Look at that. Finished well before winter.”
“You women surely are ants, not grasshoppers,” Frank’s wife said.
“There goes the neighborhood, you fucking yuppies,” Rudy said, raising his glass. I swallowed my beer.
Deirdre brought out a sage stick. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do a cleansing ceremony to drive bad spirits from the house,” she said.
“We do mind,” Helen said. “The last thing we need is more white people co-opting Native American spirituality.” Mike, the only person at the party who wasn’t white, laughed. Deirdre looked hurt.
“Thanks anyway, Dee,” Lily said, frowning at Helen.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure I’m part Indian,” offered the mill operator’s young boyfriend, still shirtless.
“Oh, of course,” Helen said. “A royal line, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know about him,” Mike said, “but when my great-grandparents came up from down South they settled with the Wyandot, married, children, everything. That was around 1820 or so. The way my grandma told it, those slave catchers were too scared of Indians to come looking for folks there.”
The hardware store manager said, “My great-grandma told me that when she was a little girl in these hills, the Shawnee would come down out of the woods because they were hungry, and our family would feed them.”
“That’s a beautiful story,” Frank’s wife said.
“But why were they hungry? That’s a fucking crime,” Helen said. “Right, Mike?”
“Do you ever think of something to say, and not say it?” I asked Helen.
“There aren’t enough hours in the day,” Helen said.
Rudy opened another beer. “You know what’s a fucking crime is private property,” he said to no one in particular.
“That’s what I’m always saying,” Helen said.
“Private property is what this country was founded on,” Frank said.
“Fuck what this country was founded on,” Helen said.
“I’ll drink to that,” Rudy said, and did.
Mike said, “Now, hold on. If they try to come on my land, I’ve got my Smith and Wesson.”
“You’re right about that,” I said. Perley turned his head to the side, and fit his mouth around my collarbone, trying to suckle. “If they try to mess with Perley or Lily—”
“Wait a minute. Who is They?” Lily asked.
“I don’t care who it is, I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said.
“But who is it that you’re so worried about?” Lily asked.
“Do you really have to ask?” I said.
“Let’s all drink to that,” said Rudy, and we all did.
Lily knew as well as I did who They were. Sardined there with our neighbors, I didn’t choose to say, According to the state, I’m not here. According to the state, I’m gone, I’m nothing. Lily is Perley’s only official parent. Neither Lily nor I liked to say it out loud, not even between the two of us. We didn’t want to make it more true. And if sometimes I felt myself hovering near invisibility, if fear made me fragile or turned me tyrant, if fear made me want to flee, well so what? I wasn’t going anywhere, not anytime soon. I was bound and determined to parent Perley within an inch of both our lives.
Maybe Helen was right about all the shit she said to people, maybe she wasn’t, but I couldn’t see how her jabbering changed anything. It didn’t change anything to stand there and talk. It didn’t change anything to talk about who They were. It definitely didn’t change anything to talk about this land, about why we were on it, who’d been on it