“No,” she said. The bartender shoved Baptiste out the door and then latched it. Harvey patted the barstool next to him for Louise to sit down. She took a hard swallow of whiskey, watched the narrow window to see her husband pass by. She thought for sure he would rattle the window with his fist. Accuse her. But she waited a long time and did not see Baptiste. She knew she did not love Baptiste, had never loved him, but the idea that he might love her crushed her. She had held no warmth for him in this dark place. She had found no kindness, no acceptance in herself or the company she kept. She was over a hundred miles from home, a hundred miles but Baptiste had found her. It would be six months until summer again. Six months before the rattlers would find the sun. She could have walked home alone and felt less lonely. Her heart was the tablet of seltzer Stoner threw in his water glass.

Louise tilted her head back in the seat of Harvey’s car. It was a cold, clear night, but snow dropped from the trees and froze on Harvey’s windshield. Louise tried to see beyond the car’s headlights. She peered into the darkness, looking for Baptiste Yellow Knife. Looking for the self she had denied. She had never been ashamed to be Indian, except in that moment when for a meal and a warm ride home she had denied her husband.

Her grandmother would tell her the love medicine was gone for certain. But sometimes Louise would sit at the kitchen table with her grandmother and dream that her sister was alive again, that Baptiste Yellow Knife was almost to their home, a deer straddling his shoulders. She told no one how she watched and waited for him to come to her. She listened to the hiss of wind. Snow rattled at the windows like sand but still he did not come. She would curl up at night beside her grandmother under a few thin blankets and old clothes and smell the palms of her hands until she fell asleep.

A pressing ache in her hollow chest made her long to sleep near the soft bellies of old men for warmth, the yawning smell of bacon fat in their wet breath, their cupboards lined with food, jars of yeast, barrels of flour she could knead to sweet bread, the golden batter of honey, smooth and clear on crisp toast, hot coffee with thick cream, full to the top rung of her ribs as they pushed into her. But the hungrier she became, it seemed, the more the men stayed away.