Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [22]
“Robert Grass didn’t call yet?”
“Robert Grass! That turkey. Not since the drive-in two weeks ago.”
“He will,” Annawake says. “My brother Dellon knows him from the construction site over on Muskogee highway. He said Robert Grass is talking osda about his new girlfriend.”
“Maybe she’s nobody I know.”
“If she’s not you, you would have heard about it. Tahlequah’s not that big.”
“That’s the truth. The whole Nation’s not that big. Somebody all the way over to Salisaw told Grandma she’d seen me in a truck with the weediest Grass ever to come up.”
Annawake smiles. “There’s no getting away from the people that love you.” She slides her glasses back on and takes the pencil from behind her ear to mark up the page she’s reading. Jinny thinks: You don’t even know. Nobody would gossip about you, they all adore you too much, plus you have no noticeable habits other than working. She blows a puff of air through her bangs and flips to a new page of the Arkansas River Gravel Claim. Why anyone cares this much about river gravel is beyond Jinny Redcrow.
“This Oprah show is about kids that saved people’s lives,” she offers Annawake as an afterthought, wondering if there’s a legal angle she has missed. Annawake and Mr. Turnbo are always speaking to each other in a language Jinny types but can’t read.
“Mmm-hm,” Annawake says, not looking up. She’s ignoring the sexy-sounding commercial and doing the smile-frown thing she does when she is reading. Annawake is known for being a super brain. Jinny went to Tahlequah High School seven years after her, and the teachers were still talking about Annawake Fourkiller like some comet that only hits Oklahoma once per century. Once at a stomp dance the chief gave her as an example of a good life path. He didn’t embarrass the family by singling out her name, though of course everybody knows who he meant. But Annawake acts like she hasn’t figured it out yet. She lives with one of her sisters-in-law in a bad little house on Blue Springs Street, and she ducks her head into the files when the good-looking guys come in making noise about their land-use papers, and she’s even nice enough to ask about stupid Robert Grass. The only real problem with her is her hair is strange. She used to have long Pocahontas hair—Jinny has seen pictures in the yearbook: valedictorian, jock, president of Cherokee Pride club, nicknamed “Wide Awake Annawake”—but she cut it all off when she went away to law school. Now it’s spiky and short like Jinny’s little brothers’, more Sinead O’Connor than Cherokee Pride. She doesn’t see how Annawake can go pointing her finger at Sally Jessy Raphael.
“Can I put Arkansas River on the floor?” Annawake asks suddenly. Oprah is back, and Annawake is scooting some papers around to make room for herself on the edge of Jinny’s desk.
“You can put Arkansas River in the river,” Jinny says. Annawake laughs, and Jinny feels guilty for thinking bad-hair thoughts. Actually, Jinny thinks, if she had Annawake’s bone structure she’d cut her hair off too, or do something different.
“So what’s the story on that little kid?”
There are four kids: a show-off boy in a scout uniform who keeps patting the hand of his huge father; two tall, skinny white girls in braces who could be sisters; and the Indian girl in overalls.
“That white girl with her is the mom. The adopted mom.”
The mother is young-looking and pretty, dressed in a nice beige suit but swinging her crossed leg like it’s not her business to act like Nancy Reagan. She is telling the story of how her little girl saw a man fall down a hole in the Hoover Dam.
Annawake makes a face of pain. “Give me a break. She made up that Hoover Dam to get on the show.”
“No, that was on the news. You were out there in Phoenix when it happened, didn’t you see it on TV?”
“Really? Maybe. I can’t think of it if I did. In law school I missed all the news that was legally uncomplicated.”
“Oprah has people that check your story,” Jinny says, a little defensive. She spends almost every afternoon with Oprah,