“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 Pocohantas hair—Jinny has seen pictures in the year-book: 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, and feels she can be trusted.
“You think it’s true?”
Jinny shrugs. “Listen. You can tell.” The woman explains that she herself didn’t see the man fall down the hole, only Turtle did. For two whole days no one else believed it, but she did, and they kept trying to get help.
“National Enquirer for sure,” Annawake says. “She read it in the grocery store.”
Oprah is talking to the mother now, whose name is something Taylor. “I can see there’s a wonderful bond between you and your daughter. Can’t you see it?” Oprah turns around, her loose rayon jacket swirling, and the studio audience says Yes, they can. She asks, “You adopted her when she was how old, two?”
“Probably she was three,” the mother says. “We don’t know for sure. She was abused and hadn’t been growing right before I got her. It was kind of an unusual situation. Somebody just gave her to me.”
“Gave her to you? ”
“Left her in my car.”
Oprah makes one of her funny big-eyed faces at the camera. “You all hear that?” she asks in a deeper, down-home voice. “Check your car before you drive out of the parking lot.”
Annawake looks at Jinny with raised eyebrows, and asks the TV set, “Where?”
“I’d just stopped for a cup of coffee,” the mother says, and seems a little surprised when the audience laughs. No way is she making this story up, Jinny thinks. “I was on a trip across the country. I’d just left home and was headed out West. The funny part about it is, all the time I was growing up in Kentucky my main goal was to not get pregnant. All my girlfriends had these babies up to their ears.”
“But that wasn’t going to happen to you,” says Oprah.
“No, ma’am.”
“And your first day out, somebody gives you a baby.”