Hearts Unbroken

by Cynthia Leitich Smith

  I scratched my name off the tryouts list.

  To hear Cam tell it, he’d ended our relationship because I’d butted into his personal family business. His friends agreed that I’d been out of line. Clingy. Controlling.

  I didn’t blame them. It’s always easier, letting Cam have the final word.

  But not everyone was a fan.

  Shelby and I had clicked because she’s no-nonsense. She takes the world as it comes, not as if it belongs to her. She’s different from Cam’s crowd that way.

  After school, Shelby posted a printout of his profile pic on the dartboard at the local pub where she waitresses. “Embrace the catharsis.” She handed me a fistful of ammunition. “You’re a woman scorned.”

  “I don’t feel scorned,” I assured her, aiming a dart at the target. “And I have lousy hand-eye coordination. I could kill someone.”

  Gesturing large, one of the Grub Pub regulars accidentally whacked over his beer pitcher, soaking the loudly feuding middle-aged couple at the next table.

  “Don’t sweat it.” Shelby jogged to do damage control. “We could stand to lose a few!”

  In June, my family road-tripped to Oklahoma for the annual Mvskoke Fest in Okmulgee. We’re talking parade, stomp dance, softball, rodeo, walk/run, games and sports tournaments (traditional and not), scholarship pageant, music, food, and pony rides for the little kids.

  I’m an urban — make that suburban — Indian. Unlike my parents, I’ve never lived full-time in my own tribal community. But it’s home.

  “I should get in shape for bronco riding,” Daddy joked, then took another bite of Indian taco.

  Mama tucked in a smile and patted his tummy. Quite the diplomat, my mother.

  In fairness, Daddy still carries a lot of muscle on his broad frame. After more than two decades in the army, he was just beginning to enjoy the more relaxed pace of civilian life.

  My brother, Hughie, was less than a month out of middle school. He used a paper napkin to wipe sweat from his brow. “Lekothe tos.”

  “Warm?” I blew out a long breath. “More like sweltering. Try: Oren hiye tos.”

  After my parents finished eating, they left to pick up Great-Aunt Sis from the doctor. Once they were out of hearing range, Hughie asked, “Do you ever wish we’d moved here?”

  “Sometimes,” I said, savoring my honey-sweetened fry bread. “But we have cousins back in Kansas, too, and we visit Oklahoma as often as we can.” We already had plans to come back in mid-July. “Do you miss Texas?”

  “I miss the Tex-Mex, especially the migas. And my friends. The bullies, not so much.”

  “You were bullied?” I’d had no idea, and I could’ve sworn Hughie told me everything.

  He began tying his clear plastic straw in a knot. “A couple of years ago, the guy sitting behind me in Texas History was making ‘war whoops’ whenever the teacher mentioned the Comanche, so I told him to shut up.

  “After that, he and his friends started whooping whenever they saw me. They thought it was funny. Then they thought it was funny to start roughing me up on the walk home from school.”

  He was my kid brother. My responsibility. “I could’ve come to get you,” I said. “I —”

  “It’s over now,” Hughie reminded me. “I’ll never see those jerks again.”

  We stayed an extra week and visited Checotah, Eufaula, and Tulsa. Mama and Daddy also took us to pay our respects at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.

  We spent quality time with our grandparents, our great-grandfather, and our great-aunties and uncles. Which is another way of saying that we spent a lot of time listening.

  Along the way, Hughie and I logged a few hours with the Mvskoke language app. My brother had already decided that next summer he’d apply to Mvskoke Language Camp.

  Cokv kerretv heret os.

  One steamy afternoon outside Tulsa, my step-cousin Gracie Halfmoon took me to Sonic Drive-In, and we sucked down blue coconut slushes at an outdoor table. I asked, “Who’s that?”

  Gracie’s a Cherokee-Seminole and a total social butterfly. She knows everybody and has lived two blocks from there her entire life.

  But before she could reply, the handsome new arrival was offering me a business card. “Thomas Dale Brown, at your service.”

  The card read TDB III Productions — independent films.

  He joked, “Baby, I can make you a star.”

  He had an athletic build, but there was obviously more to this boy than football and fantasizing about future frat parties. I was feeling starry already.

  “Sorry, Tommy,” Gracie said, squelching the sparks between us. “She’s driving back to Kansas tomorrow.”

  Was he already in a relationship? Was he not into romance? Or was it something else? Gracie didn’t seem to like the idea of Tommy and me together, and I trusted her.

  As we climbed into Gracie’s pickup truck, I felt a little buzzed from the sugary drink and banter. I’d been home long enough for the rhythm in my speech to downshift. I held myself looser, joked more freely, and shook off the stress that sometimes boiled up in my suburban good-girl mode. There, I could speak my mind and be understood. “How’re Tommy’s movies?”

  “Moody. Thought provoking. He’s won a few awards.”

  Gracie lowered the truck windows and cranked the air conditioner. “Listen, I like the guy. Everybody does. He’s one good-looking, smooth-talking Choctaw boy. Talented, hardworking, funny as hell.”

  We passed a billboard for Creek Nation Casino in nearby Muskogee. “And the catch is?”

  “Tommy Dale lives to flirt, and he’s good at it. But, for serious, he only dates white girls. Blondes and redheads, for the most part.”

  Gracie turned up an old Rita Coolidge song on the radio. “Likes ’em movie-star beautiful, I suppose.”

  Towering sunflowers strained against barbed wire. Distant thunder rumbled, and on a cloudy, gray afternoon in early August, I ran out of gas on a two-lane Kansas highway. I’d seen the warning light on the dash but forgotten about it, singing along to Beyoncé on satellite radio.

  It was only a twenty-minute walk to the nearest station.

  I took off on foot, glancing at the splotchy brown cows on one side of the road, the gold-crested green cornfield on the other.

  An approaching sedan slowed, and a semi familiar face leaned out the window. His blond hair blowing in the wind, the driver called, “Louise! Louise Wolfe! Need a ride?”

  It was Peter Ney from Immanuel Baptist, the pastor’s teenage son. He was going into his junior year at EHHS and was on the Wrestling team.

  My family’s on-again, off-again search for a new church home had been temporarily derailed by summer travel and my daddy’s conviction that anyone who works Saturdays should be forgiven for sleeping in on Sunday mornings. (Never mind that most churches offer a weekly evening service.)

  Immanuel Baptist wasn’t a contender, though. We’d given it a try, but my family longed for a closer-knit congregation. The idea that we could come and go without seeing anyone we knew seemed to miss the point, and as Mama had pointed out, my brother and I already went to high school with almost two thousand students. We didn’t need a thirty-five-hundred-member church, too.

  “Out of gas,” I admitted, gesturing with a thumb back toward the Honda. “But the nearest station is only —” A flash of lightning caught my eye.

  “Get in,” Peter said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  Opening the car door, I felt the first raindrops.

  “I have a confession,” he added moments later, flicking on his windshield wipers. “I asked around about you, after your family visited Immanuel.”

  “You did?” I gave Peter a second look. So what if he was a year younger? He had made a positive impression from the start. He’d complimented Mama’s King Ranch casserole at the “Welcome Summer” potluck on the church lawn, and over the past few months, he’d sent me a few personal e-mails about upcoming youth activities.

  Just beca
use his church wasn’t a fit for my family didn’t mean he couldn’t be a fit for me.

  “Hey, I know you’re a Cam Ryan fan,” Peter said. He began chatting nonstop about my ex-boyfriend’s football skills and stats.

  No doubt Peter had seen Cam and me together last spring and assumed we were still a couple. I probably should’ve cleared that up then, but I didn’t feel like getting into it.

  Besides, his being a die-hard fan of Cam Ryan was a major turnoff.

  At the Phillips 66, I could barely make out the digital instructions on the narrow, rain-splattered screen displays. But the signage read PLEASE PAY BEFORE PUMPING.

  Peter offered to fill the gas can from his trunk while I ran inside.

  Overhead fluorescent lights flickered in the station food mart. Hot dogs rotated under a heat lamp. The displays behind the counter hawked lottery tickets, chewing tobacco, and cigarettes. I was signing off on the charge when Peter, dripping, wrenched open the heavy glass door. “Ready?”

  “I heard about you and Cam Ryan,” the cashier cut in, and on second glance, I recognized him from school. Dylan Something-or-Other. A senior in Debate and wannabe A-lister who routinely traded gossip for social leverage. “Is this your new boyfriend?”

  “We’re church friends,” I replied. A safe enough answer. Downright wholesome.

  On the return drive, Peter and I listened to the wipers. Traffic was light. The rain had quieted to a mist. I decided to just say it. “Cam and I broke up.”

  “I’m not one of the popular people,” Peter said, evidently mortified. “I didn’t realize . . . You’re seniors. I’m only a junior.” He raked wet hair off his forehead. “I mean, I’m not a loser. I’m an athlete. I wrestle.” That last bit had radiated insecurity.

  He added, “I should’ve asked you before going on and on —”

  “No, no,” I assured him as a tractor rumbled by. “I should’ve said something earlier. Cam and I broke up after prom, not long before school let out for summer. It’s such a busy time, end of the year and all. I’m sure a lot of people missed it.”

  Not any of the “popular people,” though. They lived for that sort of thing.

  But, thinking it over, didn’t Peter’s cluelessness make him more appealing? Especially given my resolve, socially speaking, to make a fresh start? He was cute and apparently tenderhearted.

  “Mind if I ask what went wrong?” Peter nudged. “You two were always hanging all over each other. I was looking forward to bragging that I’d rescued the future homecoming queen.”

  Just like that, my patience ran out. “Kind of a personal question, don’t you think?”

  Sunflowers bowed in the wind. Cattle huddled beneath an elm tree for shelter.

  The rain had intensified again. The thunder had become more demanding.

  Peter made a U-turn and parked alongside the country highway behind my mama’s Honda Fit. He opened his car door. “I’m already drenched. Let me fuel up —”

  “One condition,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’ll treat you to lunch afterward.”

  By midafternoon, the crowd at the Grub Pub was sparse and probably wouldn’t pick up until happy hour. Nobody was playing pool or darts. I waved at Shelby and chose a leather booth with a view of Sunflower Tea Shop and Antiques. After I introduced her to Peter, she announced, “Some woman just tipped me twelve percent and a button.” She showed it to us. “A button?”

  I didn’t mention that was probably the customer’s snide way of commenting on Shelby’s low neckline. My mama’s old-fashioned enough that she wouldn’t let me out of the house looking like that. Shelby’s mama had run off with a trucker a couple of years back, and they’d started a new family outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Peter blinked at Shelby’s cleavage and excused himself to dry off in the restroom.

  “What’s with Prince Valiant?” she asked once he was gone.

  “Out of gas. Weather. Knight in shining sedan.” I’d begun to wonder if Peter had asked around about me because he’d been romantically interested but then had backed off after he heard I had a boyfriend. An intimidating, possessive boyfriend. “So far, he’s not without potential.”

  I thought he might be too churchy, though. (I hail from the judge-not school of Protestantism.) Or maybe he was one of those infamously rebellious preacher’s kids, and that day’s rescue mission had been less about doing unto others and more about doing me.

  Shelby extracted a pen from the thick twist of her auburn hair, and I requested two plates of dry-rub wings. As she left to put in the order, I kicked off my soggy sandals and decided to proceed with caution. If I made any more epic mistakes when it came to boys, I wanted them to be of the sparkling new variety. If Peter had issues with Native people, for example, I wanted to know well before I fell for him. As in before our first date.

  After he returned to the table, we made small talk about the planned Immanuel Baptist expansion. They were building new classrooms and offices. The project would cost tens of millions, and Peter was feeling weary of heading up one teen-group fund-raiser after another.

  “Sorry I snapped at you for asking about me and Cam.” Not that I owed Peter an explanation, but I could’ve been more gracious. “We had a difference of opinion about his older brother’s engagement. Cam’s future sister-in-law is a Kickapoo woman.”

  Peter dunked a plump wing into ranch dressing. “You mean, she’s a Native American? Isn’t that the PC thing to say?”

  I’d meant “Kickapoo.” Maybe it was Peter’s way of trying, though. “Cam’s mother, she has a problem with the whole mixed-marriage thing. I’m a romantic, and, well, let’s just say I could’ve kept my thoughts to myself.” Technically the truth, though I’d left a lot out.

  Peter pushed away his plate of decimated chicken bones. “That sucks.”

  He began cleaning his fingers with a Wet-Nap. “Too bad they don’t go to Immanuel. My dad does a lot of family counseling, and he always says officiating weddings is his favorite part of the job.”

  That had sounded like a winning answer until Peter concluded, “And we host weekly AA meetings in the church conference rooms, too.”

  Toward the end of her waitressing shift, Shelby asked the manager if I could help clear off a ten-top so we could cut out sooner. Rinsing dirty plates in the cramped, messy kitchen, she asked, “You’re sure that Peter wasn’t talking about Mrs. Ryan?”

  I was starting to wish I hadn’t mentioned it. “Pretty sure.”

  “Because Peter did you a solid today and he was all goo-goo eyes and, let’s face it, Cam’s mother? Known to tip a few. Plus, Louise, you know how much I love you. But you overthink everything in that giant brain of yours, and you can be sensitive. It’s what makes you such a great friend, but sometimes . . .”

  The air was hot, stuffy, and greasy. I loved the pub, but it was a wonder the health inspector hadn’t shut the place down. I loaded glassware into the dishwasher. “Sometimes what?”

  The cook, Karl, was a friendly, scruffy white guy with a prominent belly. He lowered a metal basket of waffle fries into the bubbling oil. “Give the guy a break — he was just being honest. A lot of Indians are alcoholics.” He raised his voice. “Hell, a lot of people are alcoholics. I’m proudly two years sober, little girl — doesn’t make me a horrible human being.”

  Outside the men’s dressing room, my little brother modeled a pair of dark-wash Levi’s.

  “Better,” I said. “We should pick up a couple of belts. A brown one and a black one.”

  This was the week before high school started. Twice Mama had taken Hughie clothes shopping and come home empty-handed because, at the last minute, they’d caught a summer blockbuster flick instead.

  Basically, Mama felt guilty about the time she had to devote to earning her JD and MA in Indigenous Studies. And Hughie liked watching superhero movies better than trying stuff on.

  I’d decided to make it my business. That fall, Hughie and I would be on the same campus for the first time since
elementary, but it’s not like we’d see each other most of the day.

  From what I could tell, he hadn’t made any close friends at middle school last semester. Over the summer, he’d bonded with the kids at the nearby American Indian Youth Summer Camp (focused on science and technology), but they all lived in the next town east of us.

  Ensuring Hughie’s clothes weren’t bully bait was one way for me to look out for him.

  He gave himself the once-over in the full-length three-panel mirror. “Shoes?”

  My brother, who is not especially athletic, has an irrational love of athletic footwear.

  “Shoes,” I promised.

  Hughie changed back into his cargo shorts, and we waited in line to check out behind a couple of accounting students shopping for suits and talking about their job search.

  I tried to imagine Hughie as an accountant. It seemed like a career well suited to a quiet, reserved person, and Hughie’s best subject is math.

  “I signed up for the school newspaper,” I reminded him. “That’s a class, but it’s kind of social, too.” Trying not to sound too much like Mama, I added, “Have you thought about getting involved in any school activities?”

  “You worry too much.” Hughie shook his head. “I never should’ve told you about those jerks in Cedar Park. You can relax now, Lou. I’ve got it all figured it out.”

  Stepping to the sales counter, I reached into my bead-accented purse for my debit card.

  As the clerk rang up our purchases, I said, “Okay, fill me in. What’s the Hughie Wolfe personal strategy for high-school success?” I looked up — yes, up — at my baby brother under the fluorescent lights. When had he grown taller than me? “What?”

  Hughie quickly raised and lowered his eyebrows, relishing the suspense.

  We exited the department store into the bustling outdoor mall, and he paused at a kiosk of Kansas-themed gifts. As in Kansas Jayhawks, Kansas State Wildcats, sunflowers, and The Wizard of Oz movie merchandise, the latter manifesting in snow globes, magnets, key chains, wineglasses, music boxes, and utterly darling ruby-slipper earrings.