Chapter Forty-Two
MATO
EVERY YEAR, on the weekend of the Christmas parade, around the first of December, Claremore holds a ‘lights on’ carnival. The whole town gets involved, and Main Street looks like one big Christmas decoration.
Based on the number of people at the carnival right now, I’d say the whole town is in attendance. It’s big enough that the schools close on Friday for all the groups to get ready for the parade on Friday night.
The small fair is set up in a field off the highway, and we decided to make a thing of it with Marley and Jax, and Mason and Sloane, and a tangle of kids.
Kinley had to stay home since it’s so cold outside.
She had Sawyer a little over a month ago, and Rhys has been standing guard over them like a hair-trigger guard dog until he goes back to work.
I don’t remember ever doing this when I was a kid. My father rarely left the farm because he had warrants for his arrest that he and Mr. Harlow said were ‘bullshit’.
Today is a day with no work, the smell of fried dough and onions, trampled ground, and diesel from the generators. I keep catching myself standing in the middle of it, watching Breanna and the kids, taking it in like a man who has everything he wants.
After spending twenty dollars at the milk-bottle game, Koda knocked the stack down, and Nova is now walking around with a stuffed horse nearly as big as she is, calling it Marshmallow.
Three months ago, she wouldn’t have said two words to a stranger, now she’s telling the funnel cake lady her horse’s name and that he’s ‘super fast’.
“Who won that for you?” the woman asks as she’s sprinkling powdered sugar on the fried dough seeping grease into the paper plate it’s on.
“My brother did,” Nova said with pride. “He’s the best at games.”
Koda’s cheeks turn red as he listens to the exchange, and he shoves another bite of his funnel cake in his mouth while pretending not to hear it. I wink at him as he looks up at me.
That’s the thing no one tells you about getting what you want. The deep feeling of contentment that sneaks up on you while you’re standing in line for funnel cake, and squeezes your chest.
Breanna bumps my arm with her shoulder, and I look down at her. She’s smiling up at me, the sun in her eyes, and a smear of powdered sugar at the corner of her mouth that I want to kiss off her right here in front of God and the 4-H club. She knows I’m having a moment. “You having a good time?”
Thumbing the sugar away, she leans into my hand for a second. Everything is so close to perfect it aches. “I am.”
Then my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I almost don’t look; it’s a family day, but the construction at the gym has got heavy and I frequently get phone calls. I slide it out of my pocket and look at the screen.
Tribal Services.
Turning to Breanna, I say, “I gotta take this.” I hold up two fingers. “Two minutes.”
She nods as I step away from the funnel-cake stand and to the back of a game booth where the noise is dropped. “This is Mato.”
It’s Mrs. Harjo. She hears the obvious carnival sounds in the background and guesses where we are and apologizes for interrupting our day.
She says she wants me to hear it from her before the letter comes.
The words diligent search and extended family are mentioned, but the next part opens a hole in the bottom of my damn life.
A relative has been located. The children’s mother’s first cousin. She’s Native and enrolled. She’d been notified, as the law requires, and she responded. She’s expressed interest in being considered for placement.
Mrs. Harjo goes on as if she didn’t just rip my heart from my chest. “Under the preference order,” her voice is gentle as she says the next part, “a blood relative who’s an enrolled citizen would come ahead of the current placement.
I don’t want to alarm you. Nothing’s decided, but she has standing, Mr. Blackwell, and she’s exercising it. ”
I’m responding to her, but I’m not sure what I’m saying exactly.
I know I say thank you, which is insane, I’m thanking a woman for telling me a stranger has a paper right to my kids.
My kids. I ask her when and she tells me there will be a meeting, and that the relative wants to be involved in the process, that she’ll be in touch with dates.
I hang up and stand behind the game booth, the sounds of the rings clinking off the bottles on the other side of the plywood and tarp. Calliope music is sawing away at my fraying nerves, and I put my palm flat against the wood to keep myself upright.
After the kids came to us, the ‘distant relatives’ they mentioned never came forward, and after weeks and then months went by, we let ourselves think we’re in the clear. That it’s a done deal and all that’s left is completing the process.
But now they want to ‘exercise their standing’.
A cousin. Blood. They come first. Even if the kids don’t know them.
I think about Koda turning red over a stuffed horse, the way he’s stopped watching everything around him like there might be some kind of monster around every corner.
I think about Nova always twirling Breanna’s braid around her finger and Breanna lying in bed with her some nights after a nightmare to help her go back to sleep.
Then I think about what this is going to do to the woman I love, to lose two more children after the one she lost all alone ten years ago.
I do the hardest thing I’ve done since I came back home. I wipe away the anger and the grief making me want to tear down the world, and I walk around the booth into the sunshine and I smile at my family.
Because I’m not doing this here. I won’t detonate this in the middle of a carnival with the kids ten feet away and a stuffed horse named Marshmallow.
She’ll break. I know her; I know exactly how this news is going to destroy her, and she won’t be able to hide it. I also know she’d rather die than ruin the day for the kids or for her brother and sister, a day that’s supposed to be good.
I promised her no more silence, but this isn’t silence; it’s choosing when to break her heart. It’s a big fucking difference. I’ll spend the afternoon praying that when I do tell her, she’ll see it the same way.
“Everything okay?” She asks when I step back to her side.
“Gym thing.” I lie and hate it, and then I fucking smile. “Nothing that won’t keep.”
She stares up at me a beat too long. She knows I’m hiding something.
She always knows. But Nova grabs her hand and pulls her to the carousel, and I follow them through the rest of the sun-filled, unbearable afternoon with a stone lodged on my chest, laughing on cue, lifting the kids onto horses, all while the clock in my head is counting down to a conversation I don’t want to fucking have.
It’s nearly four when the little ones start to melt down from exhaustion and Sloane is making comments about wrapping it up to go home.
As I somberly stare at Breanna, the love of my life, laughing while she looks at something with Nova, Marley bumps my arm and mumbles, “Why don’t Jax and I take Koda and Nova home?
Ya’ll look like you could use a minute.”
I could kiss her. Marley sees things others don’t; she’s always in Mom mode, ready to help. “That’d be good. Thank you.”
The kids go happily, even Nova, since she’s going with the twins. I watch Jax’s truck pull out with my children in it, safe and oblivious, and then I take Breanna’s hand to walk with her past the edge of the lot where my truck sits alone under a bare oak, away from everyone.
She turns to me when we are next to the passenger door. “Okay.” Her voice is firm, she knows something is wrong. “You’ve been off since you got that call. It wasn’t the gym. Tell me.”
Taking her hands in mine, I tell her everything Mrs. Harjo told me: the cousin, blood relative, enrolled, preference order, the meeting, everything. Breanna doesn’t like pretty words that try to soften a blow that’s going to hurt the same either way, so I say it straight.
Then I watch it happen.
All the color drains from her face, her chest jerks with a silent sob, and her wide eyes fill with tears as her mouth goes slack, like I just knocked the air out of her.
Her grip on my hands tightens like she needs my help to stand, and then a sound I’ve never heard her make before starts low in her throat.
Then I watch her pull it back in. I watch the woman I plan to spend the rest of my life with, the woman I plan to propose to on Christmas morning, physically gather herself.
Her jaw is tight and her spine is straight, and the tears filling her eyes don’t fall.
She’s breathing in through her nose, shaky breaths, and letting it out slow.
Her voice shakes a little. “They can’t see me like this.” She lets go of my hands and presses her wrists to her eyes.
I grasp her arms and pull her wrists away. “They’re fine, they don’t know anything.”
Her blue eyes volley between mine. “You’ve been holding onto this all day.”
My chest tightens; I didn’t think it could anymore, and I swallow around the lump in my throat. “I didn’t want to ruin everyone’s day.”
She nods her head, holding fast, and it guts me.
“Good. Okay. When we get home, we’ll act normal.
After we put them to bed,” her breath hitches, and she takes a breath, “you’re going to tell me everything again, all of it, every word.
” She sniffles as her eyes fill again. “Then I’m going to fall apart somewhere they can’t hear me. ”
I nod as I pull her into me. “I’ve got you, nudo.
” I hold her in the empty corner of the parking lot, my chin resting on her head, and feel her shoulders shake against my chest for as long as she needs.
It only lasts about thirty seconds before she pulls away and wipes her face and puts her emotions away.
Four months ago, she would have done this alone. She would have retreated somewhere by herself to fall apart where no one could find her and come back with her armor bolted in place.
She doesn’t have to do that anymore, and she knows that. We get in my truck, and she reaches for my hand, holding it over the console the entire way home, white-knuckled, with her face turned to the window, holding onto the worst of it until the kids go to bed.
It means everything to me that she has me to fall apart with this time.
I just have to get us home first.