Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [142]
“Fifteen minutes, okay, Mama?”
“Right. We’ll see you.” She pauses before slamming the door, bending down to peer under the top of the doorframe at Taylor. “Hon, we’re all upset. But you know I’m pulling for you. You never did yet let a thing slip away if you wanted it. I know you can do this.”
Taylor pushes her sunglasses to the top of her head and wipes her eyes, suddenly flooded with tears. “Do you have a hanky?”
Alice shakes a wad of pale blue tissues out of her purse. “Here. One for the road.”
“Mama, you’re the best.”
“You just think that cause I raised you.” Alice reaches in to give Taylor’s shoulder a squeeze, then closes the door. Turtle is already off, her pigtails whipping as she runs for the glassy box of a restaurant. Taylor takes a breath and drives the two final blocks to her destiny.
In the row of commercial fronts, between a realty office and a place called Killie’s Hair Shack, she locates the law office. It seems deserted, but when she knocks on the glass door, Annawake appears suddenly behind the glare. The door slants open. Annawake’s face is an open book of nerves, and her hair is different, a short, swinging black skirt of it around her face.
“I’m glad you made it,” she says, throwing a glance at the parking lot, seeing the Dodge and no one else coming.
“She’ll be here in a while,” Taylor says. “I left Turtle with Mama across the street at a restaurant so I could tell you some stuff first.”
“That’s fine, come on in. Taylor, this is Cash Stillwater.”
Taylor has to look twice before she sees the man in the corner sitting under the rubber tree. His worn, pointed-toe boots are planted on the carpet and his shoulders lean so that he seems drooped somehow, like a plant himself, needing more light.
“Taylor Greer,” she says with urgently insincere friendliness, extending her hand. He leans forward and meets her halfway, then sags back into his chair. His dark face seems turned in on itself from shyness or pain, behind the gold-rimmed glasses.
Taylor sits in one of the chrome chairs, and Annawake clears her throat. “Cash has asked us to help find his granddaughter, Lacey Stillwater. I guess Alice might have told you that.”
“Mama said there was maybe a relative. I don’t know how you’d prove something like that.”
“Well, there’s blood testing, but I don’t think we need to go into that at this point. Cash would just like for me to give you the information he has. His grandchild would be six now, seven next April. She was left in the custody of Cash’s younger daughter, an alcoholic, after his older daughter died in a car accident. The child was given to a stranger in a bar north of Oklahoma City, three years ago last November. We have reason to believe that stranger might have been you.”
“I can’t say anything about that,” Taylor says.
“We have no hard feelings toward you. But whether or not your adopted daughter is Cash’s grandchild, there are some problems here. If the child is Cherokee, her adoption was conducted illegally. You didn’t know the law, and I don’t hold you responsible in any way. I’m angry at the professionals who gave you poor advice, because they’ve caused a lot of heartache.”
Taylor is so far past heartache she could laugh out loud. At this moment she is afraid her heart will simply stop. “Can you just go ahead and say it? Do I have to give her up, or not?”
Annawake is sitting with her back to the window, and when she pushes her hair behind her ears they are pink-rimmed like a rabbit’s. “It’s not a simple yes or no. First, if she’s Cherokee, the fate of the child is the tribe’s jurisdiction. The tribe could decide either way, to allow you to keep her or ask you to return her to our custody. The important precedent here is a case called Mississippi Band of Choctaw vs. Holyfield. I’ll read you what the Supreme Court said.”
She picks up her glasses and a thick stapled document from the desk behind her and flips through it, turning it sideways from time to time to read things written in the margins. Suddenly