It was a long walk home. She had to rest by the roadside a few times. She hoped there would be another ride, but she saw no other cars on the highway. She only wanted to see her grandmother but when she approached the hillside overlooking her grandmother’s home she saw the truck that was parked in front. She hesitated. She recognized her father’s old vehicle and wondered why he had come to visit. Her father had married Loretta Old Horn after her mother’s death, and he rarely stopped by anymore. She felt a heaviness in her chest. She didn’t want to face her father or his second wife either. Louise hated Loretta. Loretta talked incessantly and laughed whenever anyone finished a sentence, whether it was funny or not. She was exhausting to be around. Her eyeteeth were missing and the rest of her teeth were close to rotting out. Louise couldn’t see what was so beautiful about Loretta that could have made her father leave her mother. And when her father first left them, Louise had to stop herself from thinking about Loretta’s teeth, the hissing lisp of her drunkenness, how in the winter her hair was dirty and smelled like tanning brains. “She uses rancid bear grease on her hair. That’s what makes it stringy,” she had once told her sister, though she had never seen Loretta’s hair unbraided. She had laughed with Florence when they’d happen to chance on Loretta in the store or at Indian doings.

Loretta would smile timidly at them, adjusting her dress and touching her hair, and that would make them laugh all the harder. But sometimes Loretta would look beyond their shoulders as if she was expecting someone else. Louise would hate Loretta then. Loretta could look off into the distance where Louise’s father would always be waiting. It seemed that Loretta would always have Louise’s father and he would always be good to her even if her hair stunk like beaver balls and all of her teeth fell out.

Louise wondered for a moment if something was wrong. But she didn’t want to think about that. She heard the hiss of wind through the cottonwoods. A few yellow leaves filtered down through the trees. Even if Loretta had come to visit, Louise was ready to go home. She crossed her arms over her chest and chose to believe everything was fine. Louise shaded her face and looked for her sister, hoped Grandma had sent her outside. Louise looked toward the pond where Florence often gathered cattails, to the white-soil hill where Florence liked to sit and chew the salty clay, but she wasn’t outside.