Connor went on, “I looked the address up on Google maps, and it’s a little bit outside Cameron itself, up in a canyon. You can only get there by a dirt road. From what I could tell, it looks like a little compound…there are several buildings, and what looked like a small solar array. Makes sense, because otherwise it’s hard to get power out to a place like that.” Another one of those pauses, and then he looked me directly in the eye and said, “You’ll need to prepare yourself.”
“I know,” I told him. “He may not be there at all, or he may slam the door in my face. I get it.”
“That’s not what I meant. There’s a lot of poverty on the reservation. No one’s living out there in a McMansion, you know? It can be kind of a shock, if you aren’t used to it.”
My first impulse was to say I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to see my father. But I realized that I’d never really witnessed that kind of need before. Oh, sure, I knew a lot of people who were far from rich. But there was poor, and then there was poor.
“It’s okay,” I said at length. “I mean, you know more about it than I do, but I promise not to gawk like a tourist or flip out because my father isn’t living in a split-level ranch house or something.”
“Do they even have split-level ranch houses in Jerome?” he asked with a grin.
“No, but they do in Cottonwood, and that’s where most of the people I went to high school with live.”
Connor nodded, and then the waiter came by with our drinks and took our food orders. We both got omelettes, his the sort of thing Sydney would call “heart attack on a plate” — two kinds of cheese, bacon, sausage — while I decided to be conservative and have tomatoes and black olives and feta cheese. After the waiter left, I added, “I appreciate you trying to prepare me, Connor, and honestly, I’m not sure what to expect. I mean, just because the private investigator found someone who sounds like he’s the right person — right name, right age — it doesn’t mean he’ll really turn out to be who we’re looking for. Did Lucas say that the P.I. had actually even seen my father?”
“No. He asked around, and finally got it from one of the women who works at the trading post. Traded a couple of six-packs for the information.”
At that revelation, I raised my eyebrows, and he added, “They don’t sell alcohol on the reservation. From Cameron, you have to drive down to Flagstaff to buy booze, and it’s actually illegal to bring it onto Navajo land. I guess the P.I. thought it was worth the risk, since they really don’t have enough reservation cops to enforce the law. So the woman who told him about your father wasn’t quite as much of a cheap date as you might be thinking…and Lester was taking a risk, too, although I think the worst that would have happened is that the beer would have been confiscated.”
This was all news to me, but up until a few months ago, I’d never thought I’d have a chance to explore Wilcox territory, which overlapped with the land the Navajo nation called their own. Well, at least if we did end up eating at the trading post, I wouldn’t have to worry about watching people chug beer and wine around me while I was stuck with water or herbal tea.
Our food came soon after that, and I focused on eating. It had been a long time since the cheese and crackers we’d eaten around eight the night before, since there wasn’t much else available. Yes, we’d brought over the food from Connor’s apartment and stocked the enormous Sub-Zero refrigerator in the new kitchen, but most of what we had were the components to make meals, not any ready-made dinners, and I was really not up to cooking by the time we finally stopped organizing and putting away things. Maybe it was time to revisit the policy I’d adopted from my Aunt Rachel of not having any processed food in the house. It might not have been the healthiest thing ever, but it sure was convenient.
At any rate, I shoveled in that omelette at a rate that probably wasn’t very ladylike, but at least it silenced the raging monster in my stomach. Connor seemed to understand, not eating quite as quickly — and also not protesting when I snagged one of his pieces of toast, since I finished so much sooner than he did.
“Eating for three!” I chirped as he gave me the side-eye.
At that he could only shake his head. Maybe he understood that I was trying to act normal, to pretend there was nothing unusual about this pregnancy, so I wouldn’t drive myself crazy wondering how this was all going to play out, whether I’d make it to the twins’ first birthday, or whether I’d fall down the stairs the day after we brought them home from the hospital, or one of seemingly a hundred gruesome scenarios my mind had begun to conjure up. None of that was helping, of course, so instead I tried to think about the drive to Cameron, and the person we were going out there to see. I didn’t see any way how Andre Wilcox…or Bedonie, I supposed…could be any more dreadful than his mother, but…could he?